


Just One Stray Match

by livenudebigfoot, loveandthetruth



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firewatch Fusion, Cabin Fic, Hiking Porn, M/M, Wilderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-17 16:29:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 41,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16520018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot, https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveandthetruth/pseuds/loveandthetruth
Summary: 1989. Lionel Fusco doesn't belong in the woods in general or the Shoshone National Forest in particular. But he doesn't need to be a good fire lookout. He just needs a place to hide.Unfortunately for him, he's been found.





	1. DAY 1

**Author's Note:**

> Participating in the POI Big Bang has been absolutely incredible! Thank you so much to all the folks on the Discord for doing writing sprints with me; without you, I for sure would not have been able to write this many words in the time that I had. Thank you to Dien for encouraging me, thank you to Fiona for assuring me that writing an atypical Firewatch AU where the main character falls in love with the scary guy in the woods instead is OK, and last but for sure not the least, thank you to loveandthetruth for your unflagging encouragement, edits, and gorgeous art, to be found in the depths of this very document.

Lionel’s halfway down a gravel slope, legs braced against the steep incline, hands tense and cramping on the rope, when the peg at the top gives out and he drops. He slides twenty feet, rolling and skidding and scrambling for purchase. When he gets to the bottom he stays there, lying on his side, blood oozing from a nasty scrape on his leg. Not because he can’t move. He knows, with grim certainty, that he can.

It’s just that he doesn’t belong here.

He’s himself, Lionel Fusco - fat, alcoholic, divorced, murderous, hunted - and he doesn’t belong anywhere. Especially not here. Especially not home.

He’s not sure when he realized it. Later than he should’ve, that’s for sure. If he could’ve realized it months ago, before he killed that drug dealer, before he took that money, before he trapped himself, that would’ve been best. But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, he read something about how there are people who get paid to sit in towers and speak to no one and do nothing but watch for fires crackling their way through the forests out west, and he was surprised at how good that sounded, surprised to find that all this time, he’d been looking for a way out.

So he made some calls. So he bought plane tickets. So he told his ex that he wouldn’t be around for a couple of months, and his ex had liked that. So he left.

And now he’s here.

He takes a handful of gravel and squeezes it tight, whispers to himself “You sorry son of a bitch” over and over until the pain fades and the weight in his chest lifts and his way forward becomes a blade slicing through the rocks, a ray of light. 

He stands.

* * *

He first sees the tower looming black against the orange sky, fringed with dark leaves, and he thinks it’s impossible that something so rickety can stand. But there’s sunburn on his shoulders, insects buzzing at his neck, blood dry and itchy on his leg, so he guesses the tower is home for now.

The stairs creak and groan under his boots. The effort of climbing feels like an insult, a final kick in the teeth after miles of rocks and trees and hills. He wants to stop on the landing, just slump there on a flat, manmade surface and breathe awhile, but he doesn’t. It’s too pathetic, this close to the top.

He shoulders the screen door open, fiddles with the inner door until it comes unstuck, and practically falls in the tiny room at the top of the tower. He catches himself and stands there, legs trembling, as his eyes adjust and unpick the shapes of furniture hunched in the dark. It’s a long moment before he notices the button for the generator.

Power surges on and for a second the bulb burns so bright he thinks it might shatter, but it all evens out, illuminates his home for the next few months in a yellowed, sodium glow. A cot. A desk. A tiny kitchen. An overstuffed bookshelf. In the center of the room, a map on a little round table, like a sundial in the park. And windows, god, in every direction.

Fusco lets his pack drop from his shoulders, sinks to the floor so hard his tailbone hurts. He rests his back against one leg of the desk and tugs numbly at his bootlaces, all thick with dirt, knots crusted together. 

A sudden, sharp sound makes him jump. 

Fusco sits really still, boots half-unlaced. There’s no place for a human being to hide up here, almost no place for an animal. Is it just the tower, scraping against itself when the wind blows? Is he sitting in a death trap?

The sound comes again and this time he recognizes it as a burst of static, right next to his head. He looks up, sees a walkie-talkie blinking in a charger.

“Two Forks?” comes a stern, fussy voice, made tinny by the radio. “Two Forks Tower, this is Thoroughfare Tower. Come in.”

Fusco fumbles for the radio, presses the button, hesitates. Stage fright, he guesses. He’s fluent in City Cop; the language of park rangers and woods people is new. “This is Two Forks,” he says, finally. “Over,” he adds, as an afterthought.

“Glad to see you made it,” says Thoroughfare Tower. “You’re the last lookout to arrive.” No over. Maybe it’s not an over kind of crowd.

“You can see me?” Fusco asks.

“Not well,” says the tinny radio voice, “but I saw your lights come on. Thoroughfare is northeast of you.”

With some effort, Fusco stands up, checks the map in the middle of the room to figure out where northeast is - a woods person would know without looking, he thinks - and peers out into the deepening dark. Sure enough, there’s a little yellow light nestled atop a peak way off in the distance.

“Oh,” he says. “Hey.”

“Hello,” Thoroughfare Tower says, pleasantly. “Did you have any trouble hiking in?”

His instinct is to self-deprecate, to roll over, to say “I’m not that much of an outdoorsman,” but he thinks in kind of place, with the kind of person who does this kind of thing willingly, it’d be a mistake. “Stake popped out when I was rappelling down an incline. Took kind of a fall. But mostly, I’m just a little...out of practice. Sorry for the wait.”

“Well,” says Thoroughfare Tower. “I hope you get back  _ into  _ practice.”

A burst of static and a new voice chimes in: “Harold, you took a fucking helicopter to get here.”

“If I  _ could  _ still hike in, I  _ would _ ,” snaps Thoroughfare Tower, who is apparently named Harold. “The spirit is willing, but the spine…”

“Don’t let him give you shit, Two Forks,” advises the second voice. “He’s been doing this for like 500 years and he’s a huge snob.”

“ _ 500 years _ ,” Harold repeats, incredulously.

“You did take for-fucking-ever to get here, though, Two Forks,” the second voice opines.

Fusco’s not really sure what to say about that, so he just says, “Yeah,” and sinks back to the floor, continues disentangling his laces.

“Probably don’t do that next time. You don’t want to be hiking around these woods after dark if you don’t have to. It’s pitch black under the treeline, the terrain can be tough, the whole place is rammed with caves…”

The second voice is interrupted by more static and a third very small, very feminine voice: “Bears.”

“You bet your ass, the bears,” the second voice agrees.

Static and then, a fourth voice says, “You’ve got all summer. You’ll figure it out.” And then, “I’m Joss, by the way. In Beartooth Tower.”

Fusco reaches for the radio, presses the button. “Thanks. I’m Lionel in Two Forks.”

The others sound off: The second voice is Sameen, Wapiti Tower. The third is Root, Cottonwood Tower.

“And I’m Harold,” the first voice finishes. “Thoroughfare, but you knew that.”

“I didn’t realize there were gonna be so many of us out here,” Lionel says, kicking off his shoes and biting back a groan as blood rushes back into his beat-up feet.

“You’ll hardly know we’re here,” Harold says. “If all goes well, none of us should have to meet in person all summer.”

Sameen: “I’ll drink to that.”

Root: “ _ Will _ you?”

Sameen: “I will if I find more beer.”

Fusco asks, “What are the odds of that, out here?”

“Not good,” Sameen says, sadly. “I left a stash in my cooler at the end of last summer, but my tower got ransacked during the off-season. Some dipshit backpacker got trashed on Pete’s Wicked.”

“Fucking tragic,” he says, peeling off his socks and wincing at the carnage. Probably he’s in luck there’s nothing to drink out here. It’ll keep him out of trouble. He spots a white first aid kit mounted on the wall.

“It’s Shakespearean,” she’s saying. “I brought two six packs all the way from Palo Alto last spring, hiked them in like they were my babies, made one six pack last all summer, left the other one behind knowing I’d come back for it, and…”

“My heart bleeds for you,” Fusco grits around the roll of bandages he has in his teeth.

“Just lemme know if you find anything in your tower, you little shit. Share the wealth.”

“Speaking of sharing the wealth,” Harold says, “I happen to be flush with both sunscreen and bug spray at the moment. Any takers?”

Joss: “I’m good.”

Root: “Got both.”

Sameen: “Send bug spray.”

“I’ll take both,” Lionel says, thinking of the sunburn radiating warmth through his t-shirt.

Harold tsks. “Hold out for a few days. I’ll send some over to you via bear.”

_ Via what? He for sure heard that wrong. _ “Are there bears out here?” He already knows the answer. He saw a notice when he hiked in, at the bulletin board near where he parked his car. Dos and don’ts for bear country. He read it carefully, nervously, hoping he wouldn’t need to remember it. “I mean, do you see ‘em that often?”

Sameen: “You bet your ass.”

“Not that much,” Joss says firmly. “Don’t freak out the new guy.”

Root chimes in: “They’re much more scared of you than you are of them, Lionel.”

Sameen: “That is  _ not  _ true.”

“Just keep your food secure,” Joss says. “And there’s probably a bell in your cabin you can tie to your pack. Bears mostly don’t want anything to do with people. If they can hear you coming, they’ll avoid you.”

“Thanks,” Lionel says. “I’ll see if I can find a bell around here.”

“What good advice,  _ Joss _ ,” Harold says, pointedly. And then, “Well, I’m glad we’re all here.”

A cacophony of cheers and general agreement.

“Sleep well. Get ready to watch for fires. And here’s to a very uneventful summer.”

“Hell yeah.”

“Good night!”

“See you all never.”

“Good night,” Lionel says into his radio and finally, it’s all quiet.

Lionel doesn’t go to sleep, not right away. He’s too keyed up, too sweaty from his hike. He snags a tiny packet of aloe vera from the first aid kit, forces everything else back in. For a while he just sits there in the dark, rubbing cold gel on the back of his neck. 

Finally he stands, takes a casual lap around the room. He takes the blankets from the cot between his fingers, finds them scratchy and warm and musty. He lifts the thin mattress padding the cot and stuffs the gun that’s been burning a hole in his pack all the way up here and stashes it beneath. He peers at the spines of books on the shelves, finds a lot of political thrillers, a lot of bad shit he’s going to read this summer ‘cause there’s nothing else to do. He tries the sink, finds that the pipes groan and shudder but the water works. He finds a box of dry supplies: pasta and beans and rice and canned vegetables and jerky and an unopened jar of peanut butter when he opens the cabinet to put the food away.

When he opens the other cabinet, he finds a tall, slim bottle of whiskey, four bottles of beer huddled in the corner. He picks up one of the beers, checks the label. Pete’s Wicked Ale. 

Hell of a coincidence. 

Pete’s Wicked Ale he’s never really heard of, but he knows Pappy Van Winkle like any drunk does. The bottle glistens amber in the low light. If he’s smart, if he’s brave, he’ll step outside and throw it off the tower, watch it shatter on the ground below. He picks up the bottle. He stands. He sets it on the counter.

There’s no point in throwing it out, his drunk’s brain justifies. Not when his new friends would be glad to have it. Would be a shame to throw away something so nice.

“Oh, I am in trouble,” Fusco whispers to himself. He steps away, backs right into the map on its little table in the center of the room, the room that is his world for the next three months.

It’s so small.

The world outside the windows is so wide.


	2. DAY 2

Fusco hasn’t been able to sleep since he left New York. His nights in Wyoming so far have been too dark and too quiet and too full of awful thoughts to let him really sleep. He figured the thin cot, the scratchy blankets, the creaking tower, the screaming insects, the perfect darkness of the woods would add up to another sleepless night.

Maybe it’s just that he’s tired from the hike, but he sleeps like the fucking dead. He probably could have slept another eight hours if it wasn’t for the distant sound of explosions and the crackle of the radio. 

“Two Forks!” Harold’s saying. “Two Forks, are you there?”

Fusco groans, pulls the radio under the blankets, pushes the button. “‘M here, Harold.”

“Do you see that?”

He sits up, cracks his bleary eyes open, and sees fireworks - red and blue and glittering gold - bursting over the tips of the wavering pines some ways away. “Shit,” he murmurs. “Yeah, I see it.”

“Looks like they’re close to Jonesy Lake. I know it’s your first day…”

Fusco swings his legs out of bed, manages to not cry out in pain when his feet hit the floor. “Got it. I’ll go out there, take care of it.”

“ _ Take care of it _ ,” Sameen repeats. “Look at you, new guy.”

“Ah, Sameen, you’re awake. Would you mind doing some trail repairs on the...”

The rest of Harold’s instructions to Sameen are drowned out by her groan of disgust.

Fusco really doesn’t want to put his shoes on again, but there’s no way around it. He gets dressed, changes the bandages on his calf, puts on clean socks, ties a bell he finds in the desk to his pack to keep the bears away, and takes his first steps outside the door.

It sucks. Right away, it sucks. The muscles in his legs lock up the first time he takes a step and it’s too early in the morning for the sun to be beating down on him that hard and already there’s a fly buzzing at his ear. He takes a deep breath, goes back inside for a hat he saw dangling from a hook, brushes his teeth at the spigot at the foot of the tower, stretching out his tight calf muscles as he spits toothpaste into the gravel. Then he takes off walking in the direction of the fireworks, ignoring the pain in his legs.

That turns out to be a good move. Halfway through the first mile, his muscles start to loosen up and he’s moving one hell of a lot better. Helps that it’s fairly flat terrain, that it’s only a mile and a half to Jonesy Lake. 

“So, new guy,” Sameen asks as he inches down a slope of rock like a crab. “How’re you gonna take care of it?”

“Dunno. Figure it out when I get there.” He squints up into the sun, trying to remember which way he’s supposed to be headed without looking at the compass. “Guess I’ll ask ‘em if they’re aware it’s dry season and if they wanna be responsible for burning down the whole fucking forest. And confiscate their fireworks. Can I do that?”

“Technically, you have no authority to do so,” Harold says. “But please do.”

“You a cop?” Sameen asks. “You sound like a cop.”

Joss asks, “What does a cop sound like? Good morning, everyone.”

Sameen: “Hey, Joss. Like him. He sounds like a cartoon of a cop from Brooklyn.”

“The Bronx,” Fusco says. “I’m from the Bronx.”

Silence on the airwaves.

“So, wait,” Sameen says. “ _ Are  _ you a cop?”

“Well, I’m on vacation.”

“You never  _ really  _ go on vacation,” Joss says. 

“You too?” he asks.

“Used to be,” she says. “Then I passed the bar.”

“Christ. That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“Not really,” Joss says. “A lot of people who do this kind of thing are ex-law enforcement or ex-military. And I’m both.”

He whistles. “You’re a regular triple threat.”

Ahead of him, more fireworks pop. 

About a thousand years ago, when he was a beat cop, he had a way of walking, honed over hours of patrolling the same beat, over and over again, day after day. An economical way of moving, so he didn’t walk himself to death. It was designed with cracked sidewalks and crowds in mind, so it’s doing him no good here, but he can feel his body finding a new way to move among trees and rocks and gnarled roots.

He’s in the midst of an easy stroll through dry, yellow grass up to his hips, rattling against his legs, when he spots the campfire. The fireworks died out some minutes ago, but that thin streak of smoke remained, hanging in the air. Now he can see the source, ringed in heavy rocks, some bright tongues of flame dancing among the logs. 

As he draws closer, he kicks an empty beer can out from among the brush, still bright and shiny, still with a little bit of liquid left in side that sloshes gently when he shakes it. Picking over the area, he finds sleeping bags, packs, a hell of a lot more beer cans, and a bucket of water that he tips unceremoniously over the flames. No fireworks.

In the quiet that comes after, he hears music, very faint, from somewhere beyond the trees.

He takes the radio in one hand. “Found their camp, I think,” he says to Harold. “Don’t see them, but I think I hear them. They left a fire going, so I put that out.”

Harold’s voice comes promptly: “Thank you, Two Forks. If you can be sure that you’ve confiscated any remaining fireworks, that would be a weight off of my mind.”

“No problem.” He returns the radio to his belt and follows the music into a clump of gnarled trees. He doesn’t know the song, it’s some shitty pop thing that slides right out one ear seconds after entering the other. As he winds his way down the path, ducking under low, twisted branches and stepping over fallen tree trunks, it grows louder and louder. A sense of unease comes over him when he finds a tank top hanging from a branch, fluttering in the breeze, and that sense of unease grows a little when he finds shorts draped over a mossy log and turns into a kind of grim certiantly when he finds a sports bra flung carelessly across the path.

So it’s that kind of situation. It’s not an unfamiliar situation, exactly. Anybody who’s been on the subway back in New York too late at night has been at risk of the same situation but in close quarters. He’s just aware that out in the middle of nowhere, far from crowds and help, he’s in danger of being seen as a huge fuckin’ creep.

Not that they’d be wrong, but not for the right reasons.

He steps through a gap in the trees and into the light.

Weirdly enough, it’s the lake that gets to him. He’s adapted to a world that’s tall and thin and crammed all together and capped in steel and glass and concrete. The wideness of Jonesy Lake, the sunlight winking on the clear, bright water, the banks all fringed in rich, dark pines, the sky bright blue and streaked with pure white clouds: it nearly chokes him. He barely notices the girls.

And they are girls, he thinks. They’ve swum out to almost the opposite shore of the lake, perched like mermaids on a big round rock that juts out of the shallow water, barely visible. Which is probably a good thing. That’s an educated guess based on the pile of excess clothes and underwear crumpled on the rocky shore, just by a log where their boombox sits, still blasting that shitty song. Looking closer, he sees shreds of singed cardboard littered among the rocks and, happy day, a bag of fireworks, pristine and unlit. 

He tucks the bag into his pack, cups his arms around his mouth, and calls out, “Hey!”

They carry on talking, splashing.

“Hey,” he calls again, raising his voice to be heard over the music.

The girls pause and he hears one, far off, but very clearly, ask the other, “Who the fuck is that guy?”

“I’m with the Park Service,” he yells. Not a lie, but vague enough that it sounds like he might be a ranger. Somebody with authority.

“Get lost, creep!” shouts one of the girls.

Casually, he picks up the boombox and hefts it in one hand, letting it swing dangerously over the rocks, over the spot where the waters of Jonesy Lake lap at the shore. That gets their attention real quick.

“Hey!” one of them calls, “that’s mine!”

“Ladies,” he says, evenly, “you don’t have to swim in to shore, but I’d sure appreciate it if you’d lend me your ears for a second.”

“Get fucked,” the other one says. 

“Another word out of you and this thing goes for a swim.” He swings it higher than usual, lets it leave his fingertips, catches it gracefully before it hits the ground.

The girls fall silent.

“It’s dry season,” he says. “The risk of forest fires is high. You can’t be setting off fireworks.”

“We won’t do it again.” Her voice is thin, taut. She sounds like a rookie hostage negotiator, teetering on the balance.

_ I know you won’t _ , he thinks, feeling the weight of the fireworks in his pack. “Good,” he says out loud. “I put out your fire. You can’t leave it burning if you’re not gonna be there to keep an eye on it. That’s a pretty good way to burn the whole forest down with you in it.”

“OK!” she calls. “Now put my boombox down!”

He thinks for a second that he could probably let it drop, let it bounce unceremoniously onto the rocks and see if it could still play then. A tax for being a pain in the ass and wasting his time. It seems like a lousy precedent to set his first day on the job, though. Even over something so petty. Especially over something so petty. He sets the boombox back on the log, right where he found it.

“Enjoy the rest of your camping trip!” he calls to them. “Don’t make me come out here again!”

“Fuck off, you old creep!”

He imagines his hiking boot striking against the boombox, sending plastic shards flying, but instead he just calls, “Fuck off yourself,” like it’s, “Have a nice day!” and adjusts his pack.

As he’s walking away under a comfortable volley of hurled curses from the two campers, this warm, easy feeling of satisfaction comes over him. Not the kind of satisfaction he’d get out of busting a big case wide open or knowing he’d made the world a little safer. Just a comfortable, low-stakes high. If burning an entire forest down is low-stakes. Probably Harold wouldn’t think so. But at the end of the day, it’s just two kids fucking around in the woods, and that’s such a non-problem, it almost feels good to solve it. 

He unfolds the map from his pocket and continues along the edge of lake. Fusco’s not any kind of Boy Scout, but he figures he can see another way home from here, one that’ll take him through canyons of red sandstone. Might be nice to get the lay of the land on his first day. Take the scenic route. All he has to do is follow the stream, if he can find the stream.

He finds the stream easy enough. It’s a bright, busy little brook that wends its way among mossy rocks and into the canyons, and it’d be easy enough to keep following it, except to Fusco’s aching feet, it’s kind of irresistible.

Once he’s far enough away from the lake and the pissed-off girls for comfort, he settles heavy on a smooth, flat rock and tugs off his hiking boots, barely bothering to loosen the laces. He has brains enough to take his socks off and leave them tucked away, dry, in his boots.

It hurts at first, so cold it makes his bones ache and burn, makes him think his toes will never move again, but it all fades to soft, cottony numbness and then gradually, tenderly, a refreshing coolness like he’s never felt before, soft drink commercial refreshing, impossibly cool. Fusco exhales slow and lets the soles of his feet graze against the glass-smooth pebbles at the bottom of the stream. 

He lets his eyes drift shut. 

There’s this strange awareness that comes over him, bit by bit. It’s a little like when you’re listening to a song and at first it’s just music, just a solid block of sound, but after a while you can pick it apart and hear each instrument, each musician, each note. Familiarity builds up in those minutes with his eyes shut, and general outside clamor becomes finer, easier to separate into its different parts. The hearty rustle of glossy, living leaves brushing against each other in the breeze. The sweet, soft trickle of the stream flowing over rocks and sticks and weeds and him. Birdsong that he manages to pick apart into three different birds, each playing their own songs and harmonizing against each other. Insects, screaming in the heat.

And a bad feeling. A feeling like being watched. He’s never quite known where it comes from; just that it’s kind of a social sense, an innate knowledge that there’s another person close by, focused on him.

He opens his eyes, expecting to see some animal’s eyes on him, expecting to see nothing but evidence of his own paranoia. What he sees instead is...someone.

Fusco almost wouldn’t have known it was a person, if it wasn’t for the eyes. It’s so caked in dirt, so matted, its clothing the exact un-color of dirt and rocks and tree trunks that Fusco might’ve thought it was a shadow of some low-slung branch if the eyes weren’t bright blue and fixed on him, staring. If the hand poised half in the stream, frozen in the act of lifting a canteen, had not been washed clean, showing well-tanned skin.

“Oh my god,” Fusco says, nervous laughter building in his throat, wondering what made him so stupid that he’d bring his gun all the way out to the woods just to leave it under his mattress all the time, wondering if the barely-a-person across from him is similarly stupid. “You scared the shit out of me, man.”

The figure lurches away from him, darting in among the trees, and without so much as a shaking leaf, he’s gone. And Fusco might as well be alone.

“Holy shit,” Fusco says, to no one in particular. He sits there a long moment, wondering if the person - the guy, he’s pretty sure - is going to come back with an axe and a grudge or maybe come back quiet, shy, starving. He doesn’t do either one. Finally, Fusco gropes numbly for his radio.

“Thoroughfare?” he calls out. His voice shakes more than he expects it to.

“Lionel.” His voice comes in right away, so fast he wonders what it is Harold does all day, that he can always answer so quickly. “Was your first mission successful?”

Jesus, the fireworks. He almost forgot. “Went great,” he says, patting his pack. “If you need a bottle rocket this summer, I’m your man.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Harold says. “Keep them in a safe place, won’t you?”

“Sure. Listen.” He lowers his voice, as though the man is listening. “I think I saw a guy?”

“Oh?” Harold doesn’t sound particularly interested. “Was he terribly upset about you confiscating the fireworks?”

“They were girls,” Lionel says, tugging his boots on, “and yeah, they were pissed. But this was some other guy, popped out of the woods from nowhere. I said hi to him and he bolted.”

“Ah. Well, the Shoshone is a popular camping destination. You’ll see other people in your zone from time to time.”

“But you didn’t see him,” he says, shouldering his pack and backing away from the stream, nearly stumbling in the high grass. “He barely looked like a person. He looked like he’d been living out here.”

“I’d like to say it’s unusual, Lionel,” says Harold, unnecessarily slow, “but some people take getting off the grid very seriously.”

Root’s tiny voice chimes in: “Even more than us.”  

“Perhaps an unwise level of seriousness,” Harold amends thoughtfully. “With regard to personal safety. And hygiene. But as visitors to the Shoshone go, they’re relatively polite. They control their fires well and uphold Leave No Trace. There are occasionally issues with firearms, but we won’t send you out on that.”

“You just ran into your first mountain man,” Sameen says. “Leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone. Mostly.” 

“Got it,” he says.

“You OK?” Joss asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “Just spooked me, that’s all.”

He walks home among canyons, scrambling over rocks striped in red and yellow and pink like a sunset along the bright, silvery track of the stream. He finds a steadiness, an awareness, a confidence that it’s half a mile further up the canyons and then an easy climb over rocks and then he’ll be home under the tower. There’s an ease to that, and a power. He breathes deeper and his strides lengthen.

But a few times he goes still, shoulders tense, ears pricked, listening to the distant sounds of rock sliding on rock.


	3. DAY 9

“Hey,” Fusco says, slightly out of breath as he clings to a steep rock face, “does anybody want beer?”

“- at the fuck are you tALKING ABOUT!?” Sameen shouts into the radio. “You had beer this whole time?”

Fusco is preoccupied with the last few inches that will take him to the ground, arms shivering as he lowers himself gently, gently to the lowest rock. He steps up, lifts the radio to his mouth. “I mean, it’s been like a week and change. But yeah.”

“You asshole.”

“I just found it,” he says, “in the tower.”

Not true, but he’s been arguing with himself, back and forth, whether to give it away or destroy it or drink it (who’d know?), and last night, he finally figured that he’d have the hardest time drinking it if he promised it to a friend.

“What do you have?” Sameen asks.

“If there’s more than one can or bottle, please save one for me,” adds Joss. It’s the only time he’s ever heard her ask anything from anybody, so he resolves to see to it that Joss gets at least one beer.

“Six bottles of Pete’s Wicked Ale,” he says. “That’s what you lost, right, Sameen?”

“Right,” she says, thoughtfully. “That’s really weird.”

“Well, weird or not, it’s yours. How do I get it to you?”

Harold breaks in, “I may have a solution. Bear’s in your vicinity. Can you whistle, Lionel?”

“Sorry,  _ what’s _ in my vicinity?”

“Can you whistle or not?”

For a second, he can’t quite speak. Too many questions jostling for space. “Yeah,” he says, finally. “Yeah, I can.”

“Then please do.”

If you put him on the spot, Fusco’d say he’s a pretty good whistler, loud and clear. When his mother made him do piano lessons as a kid, his teacher told him he had an ear for that kind of thing, perfect pitch. He ditched piano lessons pretty quick, but he always hung on to that. 

The whistle that comes out of him in the woods is thin and reedy, tuneless. Nervous.

“That should do,” Harold says.

He hears it long before he sees it. He’s attuned to the woods now and he knows how a squirrel can bring the whole fucking house down. This is a lot bigger, a lot louder than a squirrel. And it’s moving fast: snapping branches, scattering rocks, parting the tall grass like a shark’s fin parts the water.

Fusco takes a few steps back. “What the hell is that thing?”

“They’re more scared of you,” Sameen intones, “than you are of them.” Her voice drops. “Sounds fake, though, doesn’t it?”

The bushes next to Fusco begin to shake and rattle and with that, he whips around and breaks into a run.

Whatever it is bursts out of the bushes and onto the path behind of him and he can hear it, claws clicking on the stone, breath rasping. He expects to feel its teeth on the back of his neck any second.

Instead it plants two paws on his back and gives him a shove before bouncing off him with a cheerful yelp.

Fusco skids to a stop and turns to find a big dog frolicking on the path behind him, tongue lolling in doggish joy. It looks kinda like a German Shepherd - that kind of color, that kind of shape - but just off enough that it probably isn’t and somebody who knew anything about dogs would call him an idiot.

The dog wears a day-glo orange harness, outfitted with pouches bulging with supplies. On the side of the vest, in Sharpie, someone has written, “I Am Bear.” 

Fusco waits to get his breath back before lifting the radio back to his mouth. “You guys are fucking hysterical.”

Peals of laughter on the line.

He’d resent it more but, you know, he’s a cop. He’s been hazed before and compared to that, this is a pillow fight. It helps that he can kind of see the humor in it. Bear moseys up to him, eyes brown and curious, and snuffles at Fusco’s hand with his wet, black nose.

“Aren’t you supposed to use Saint Bernards for this kinda thing?” Fusco asks, scratching Bear under his chin. “Little brandy barrel on the collar?”

“It’s too hot for St. Bernards. And we’re fresh out of brandy.”

“Whose dog is he?” Fusco asks as the dog leans heavy into his hand, practically falling over from how badly it wants to be petted.

There’s silence on the radio. He doesn’t notice at first. He’s wiping this dog’s spit onto his shorts and presses the button on the radio again. Maybe it didn’t go through the first time. “Whose dog is this?”

“Mine,” Finch says, a little too quickly. “You should know that he only responds to Dutch commands.”

“Oh, yeah?” Fusco asks. He unzips the bags on the dog’s back and takes out a couple bottles of sunscreen, some bug spray too, and starts loading it into his own pack. “You wearin’ wooden clogs out there at Thoroughfare, Harold?”

Harold snorts. “I think not. Imagine the arch support. Or lack thereof. No, Bear’s an army dog and for reasons that are a little above my paygrade, he was trained using Dutch commands. If you want him to follow you, the command you want is ‘hier’.” 

Right on cue, Bear’s ears prick up, tail wagging warily as he looks around for his invisible master. Fusco takes the last of the sunscreen out of Bear’s pack and pats him on the head. “Take a load off, buddy.” Into the radio, he says, “Thanks for the tip, Harold. I’ll let you know if I need the command for ‘stop biting me’.”

“‘Foei’ means ‘no’,” says Harold, helpfully.

“Hier,” he tells Bear, although it’s probably more like plain old English “here”, which means the same basic thing, on balance. Bear sure doesn’t seem to mind and he starts trotting alongside Fusco.

Bear’s a good hiking buddy, as it turns out. He’s always on the move, sometimes darting ahead to scout the trail, sometimes looping back behind to check they aren’t being followed, but mostly he sticks right by Fusco, pink tongue lolling as he walks. He withholds any judgments he might have in his fuzzy, wedge-shaped head when Fusco sinks panting onto a log and stays there for a couple of long minutes, waiting for the throbbing in his calves to lay off. 

“I’ll get up in a second,” he says to Bear, who has just completed his second lap of the log and is now watching him with eager, golden-brown eyes. “I’m still working on this whole hiking thing.”

Bear’s biggest virtue as a hiking buddy, it turns out, is that he’s not a big talker. He’s more of a listener. He listens intently with his big, bat ears as Fusco talks about how bad his fucking feet ache, about how sick of getting eaten alive by mosquitos he is, about how dog-tired he is  _ (and you’d know about that, Bear, am I right?) _ , about how he doesn’t know how to sleep without street lights bursting through the curtains and car alarms screaming in the dead of night, about how he’s scared his job won’t still be there when he comes back to the city, about how scared he is someone will come for him through the trees with guns and shovels and badges to make him disappear, about how bad he misses his son. Bear doesn’t say shit all the way back to the tower. Bear’s cool like that. 

He thinks about asking Bear to wait for him at the bottom of the stairs to save him the walk, but before he can ask Harold how to say “stay” in Dutch, Bear’s already clattering up the staircase at top speed, having the time of his life. Which is more than Fusco can say for himself. By the time Fusco finishes his labored trip to the top, Bear’s lying down by the door, head on his paws, gazing sleepily at Fusco in a way that seems to ask, “What took you so goddamn long?”

“Enough lip out of you,” he says to the dog as he pushes the door open. 

He loads the six beers into Bear’s packs, three per side, all swaddled in shreds of tarp to keep them from breaking against each other. He thinks about throwing in the Pappy Van Winkle as a bonus for whichever lucky son of a bitch Bear got to first.

He thinks about it long and hard, cool glass pressed to his temple. “I’m gonna let you in on a little secret,” he whispers to Bear. “I got a real fuckin’ problem and I got rid of everybody in my life who would’ve given a shit. And now it’s just me looking after me. So, uh,” he says, as the dog licks a humid stripe up his cheek, “I’m fucked.”

Bear wags his tail.

Fusco puts the whiskey back in the ice box where it belongs and picks up the radio. “OK, the dog is loaded. How do I send him back to you?”

Silence on the airwaves. Not that weird. It’s not all chaos all the time on that radio, although sometimes it feels that way. Pretty often, it’s all just quiet, people absorbed in their separate tasks, their separate zones of impassable tree and rock.

Kinda freaks Fusco out a little, if he’s honest.

The little bark of static that comes then is comforting. Fusco’s started to think of it like one of the little noises people make before they start to speak, a cleared throat, a tiny intake of air. When it comes, that means somebody else is out there.

But this time, nobody speaks. 

You get those sometimes too, false starts. Somebody hits the button by accident, or else they start to say something and don’t finish. Fusco shrugs, opens the door and starts to guide Bear down from the tower. They’re about halfway down when Fusco hears a bird through the radio. 

Just the radio.

Meaning, as far as he can tell, somebody’s dead silent, holding down that button. 

Probably somebody put their pack down on top of the radio, he thinks, or somebody’s got it wedged under their arm, or they’re gripping it in their hand, not thinking. Something like that. Something not worth worrying about. Fusco pauses on the landing, wedges the radio right up against his ear, listening hard.

There’s static, of course, a soft howl like a faraway wind. There’s a bird, again, very faint, very occasional. And then, real slow, real quiet, there’s the breath.

It’s almost impossible to hear, it’s just the slowest, faintest drag of air across the radio but there’s something to the rhythm, something to the way it rasps that makes it unmistakable. Somebody’s breathing into the radio. 

His head conjures up somebody - Harold maybe, or Root, he hasn’t heard from her in a while, when was the last time they heard from Root? - who fell, maybe slipped on some loose rock or maybe their pin fell out like his did and now they’re lying at the bottom of a ravine, clutching their radio in a bloodied fist and breathing because they can’t talk, just breathing for help. 

With trembling fingers, Fusco holds the button on his radio down. “Hello?” he murmurs, real soft. “You OK?”

His answer is a tiny subvocal noise, not a grunt, not a gasp, just the tiny little click of the first letter of a first word getting caught in somebody’s throat. And then nothing.

And then a big bright burst of static and it’s Harold saying, “Sorry, Lionel, did you need something?”

He almost laughs, something bubbling and crazy from deep inside. He’s cracking up, he thinks. He’s scared of trees and hiking and being alone and it’s driving him absolutely bugfuck. “You hear that?” he rasps, suddenly out of breath.

“No,” Harold says, “hear what?”

“Thought I heard…” Fusco swipes his hand over his forehead, rakes his fingers back through his hair too hard. “...You know what, never mind. How do I get rid of this dog?”

Harold tells him how.

He misses Bear after he leaves, more than he expects to. Nice to have a friend nearby.

Root checks in a couple hours later, fresh from a long hike that took her out of range. Around dinner, Sameen gets on the radio to call him a fucking hero, voice slack and pleasant with boozy sincerity. 

“Save some for me,” Joss says, only half-pretending to be threatening.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sameen says.

So that’s everybody accounted for, Fusco says, as he cooks rice over the stove and watches the air over the trees cool from hot, angry fuchsia to deep purple. So there was nothing to worry about, he thinks.

So it was all fine, he tells himself.

He sleeps a few begrudging hours.


	4. DAY 33

It’s the fifth call like this in the last three weeks and Fusco has his routine down. He applies sunscreen to his face and neck as he lays out his gear: notebook, pencil, map, Polaroid camera, extra pack of film. He’s tearing through it, these days. The wall above his desk is peppered with what amounts to crime scene photos. The rest of the walls are a little less populated, dotted with stuff he just kinda sees along the way. Trees. Mountains. Valleys. A deer, one time. It’s not all work.

But it _looks_ like work, Fusco says as he stows everything away neatly in his backpack, and that’s the important thing.

The result is, when he pulls out his notebook, licks the tip of the pencil, and starts taking notes, he looks professional as hell. “Around what time did you notice the disturbance?”

“Around five this morning,” says Marie, the self-appointed general of the small band of fiftysomething women, a book club in flannel. She stands at the head of the party, hands on her hips, close-cropped gray hair tousled. “Beth got up to start the fire and she heard something rattling around.”

Another woman - he guesses Beth - leans around Marie, waves.  “I’m in that tent,” she says, pointing to a battered neon orange dome. “And I heard the rustling coming from over there.” She points to the cooler, thoroughly ransacked. Her part completed, she steps back, and Marie resumes supremacy.

“We’re not new at this,” she says. “We do this for weeks every year. We have a good cooler, we hoist our food if it’s too high risk. Somebody opened that cooler, so don’t tell me we’re idiots and a bear took our food.”

Fusco’s heard that one before. Harold and Sameen and the rest say that people never want to blame themselves. Fusco knows from his last job that that’s pretty much true. Harold and Sameen and the rest say that these woods are crawling with bears, that they’re smarter than people when it comes to getting food, that they’re a hell of a lot stronger and better at climbing than people, that bears raid campsites all the time. And Fusco believes them, because what the hell else is he supposed to do?

All the same, he thinks, bending over the cooler and taking a Polaroid of the pristine, untouched latch: you’d think a bear would make more of a mess of things. You’d think more people would accept that explanation.

“I think I saw him,” one woman says. “I mean, I can’t be sure, it was just a shape through a tent but it looked...tall and skinny. It didn’t look like a bear. We’ve all seen bears.”

The group makes a noise of assent. They’ve all seen bears.

Fusco, who has never seen a bear, bends at the knee. A shape in the dirt has caught his eye. “If you don’t mind, ladies,” he says, “could I see the soles of your boots?”

They blink down at him.

“Just to rule this print out,” he says, tapping the dirt beside it.

They’re all wearing boots, so it’s not all that big of a deal to show him. In the rubber on their boots he sees lines, he sees circles, he sees ovals and irregular, wedge-like shapes. The boot print in the dirt near the cooler has treads shaped like clovers. Not a clover in sight on these women.

“Thanks for that,” he says. He brings the Polaroid to his face, puts the boot print in frame. Snaps.

“Is that all you can do?” Marie asks as he shoulders his pack.

“For right now,” he says. “I’m gonna talk to my boss about the bootprint and the cooler lid, see what he thinks. In the meantime, keep doing what you’re doing. If you see or hear anything else...call.”

“Do you think there’s a person living in these woods?”

He blinks in the sun for a moment, chooses his next words real carefully. “I think that’s likely,” he says, after a moment. “It’s a lot of woods, lot of places to hide. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t anybody at all living out here. But I don’t think you or your friends are in any danger, ma’am. I’ve seen campsites raided. I haven’t seen anyone hurt.”

That doesn’t satisfy her. But then, why would it?

It’s funny, he thinks as he walks away from the campsite and he feels this pang of loneliness slice through him. He keeps thinking he’s getting used to being alone all the time, that even the voices of his coworkers on the radio are too much sometimes, that he could just fade into the trees and become a part of life out here. Then he spends twenty minutes with people and even when they don’t like him, even when they’re pissed at him, he finds he misses them so desperately as he goes.

 _I need a partner_ , he thinks to himself. Not for the first time, he wishes Bear could’ve stayed. He doesn’t even like dogs all that much. It’d just be nice to have someone else around.

As he walks, the pang of loneliness fades and Fusco finds he’s enjoying himself again. Feels crazy to like being outside this much, to find this much peace in birdsong or the rustling of leaves. Maybe it’s just something he’s been missing out on his whole life.

He makes a point of identifying the trees, the flowers blooming on the forest floor, if he can. There’s spruce pines, sprawling cottonwoods, scraggly little sagebrushes, mock orange shrubs flecked with gold flowers, purple bells of lupine, and bright embers of prairie fire, shockingly bright in the tall green grass.

Sounds impressive, but there’s a poster in his tower - Flora of the Shoshone - and he memorized it one night, just to have something to do. He feels like he knows something now, just a little.

“It’s not a bear,” he says out loud.

Not great, that he’s talking to himself, but it’s nice to hear it said with his own ears. Whoever’s raiding these campsites tries to seem like an animal sometimes, he thinks. He thinks they knock shit over on purpose, he thinks they scratch stuff up with a knife sometimes, but it’s always a little too neat. And everywhere, he sees that boot with its clover tread. It’s all over his wall at the tower in Polaroid form, sometimes smudged out, sometimes just the toes like they were running, sometimes partly obscured by what he thinks is tarp to muffle sound, sometimes crystal clear in mud.

Somebody’s not bothering to cover their tracks.

It’s not all that big a deal, he thinks. Nobody’s relying on that food to survive, nobody’s in a position where they can’t call for supplies. The guy hits big, fat, well-stocked campsites - lots of people, lots of food - not far from easier trails. He’s not looking to starve anybody. And it is a guy, Fusco’s pretty sure. He’s never seen a woman with feet that size.

He thinks about the guy he saw at the stream all those weeks ago. Never got a look at his boots.

Still, if this is the worst thing, the most high profile mystery in the whole goddamn woods right now, Fusco figures he’s safer than he’s been in a while.

From the radio: “That was impressive, Lionel.”

 _If he doesn’t say so himself._ Fusco unhooks the radio from his belt. “That’s twenty years on the force, Harold.”

Harold makes a noncommittal sound. “I wasn’t able to hear your no-doubt deft handling of the situation at the campsite,” Harold says. “Your radio wasn’t on.”

“Yeah, I was gonna say.”

“No, I was referring to your hiking speed. Did you run?”

Fusco, strolling lazily under yellow beech leaves, would not run if his ass was on fire. “I wouldn’t run if my ass was on fire, Harold,” he says. “Why?”

Harold hums thoughtfully. “Did I misunderstand? I thought the campsite was four miles away. It’s extraordinary that you’re back in your tower already.”

Fusco, standing stock still under yellow beech trees, still two miles out from his tower, says, “What?” very softly. He forgets to hold down the button on his radio.

“I can see you,” Harold says, “moving around in there.” And then, “...Wait.”

Fusco realizes his mistake, numbly clamps his thumb over the button. “Harold, I’m nowhere near my tower.”

“Oh, _no_ ,” Harold says, very softly.

Fusco _runs_.

He hasn’t, not for a long time, not if he didn’t have to, not for more than a block. He doesn’t like it, he’s not the right build for it. He’s not even sure he wants to see what he’s running towards, because yeah it could be some dumbass hiker exploring the lookout tower and it could be some weird survivalist who raids campsites like Yogi fucking Bear, but it could be Patrick Simmons with a gun and a grudge, could be Jimmy Stills with a shovel and a “Sorry, Lionel, but you know how it is,” could be the end of him. He should be running the other way.

He vaults over a log, not so gracefully, and keeps going.

In a weird way, maybe he likes it out here. Maybe he’s not ready to turn tail and run because some asshole ransacked his tower for supplies, maybe he wants to defend his turf. Maybe he’s thinking of the gun he’s got hidden under the thin mattress of his cot, although he’s not sure what kind of good it’ll do him if Simmons and Stills and whatever goons they might’ve brought with them are already up there. Maybe he just needs something to chase after.

Maybe he’s just bored.

His lungs are burning, calves throbbing like they’re about to burst, and finally he hears Harold over the noise in his head.

“Lionel!” he’s saying, sharply. “Lionel, where are you?”

He lifts the radio to answer, finds he doesn’t have the air to speak. He bends at the waist, hands on knees, wheezing. “I’m here,” he chokes out after a while. “I’m like a mile out.”

“Well, take your time,” Harold says. “They’re gone, whoever they are. I watched them go.”

Fusco sucks down fresh air, feels oddly disappointed.

“Be careful,” Harold is saying. “It’s best if you don’t run into them on your way home.”

“What do I do if they took food?” he asks.

“There’s a supply drop coming soon,” Harold says. “I’ll make sure it’s taken care of.”

“Thanks.” Fusco breathes deep. A nervous laugh escapes on the exhale. “What the hell, right?”

“I know.” Harold chuckles a little himself, slightly breathless. “I’m sorry that happened. Most hikers know better than to disturb the lookouts. I hope nothing of great importance was taken.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Fusco says. “I didn’t bring anything out here that can’t be replaced.”

“That’s very wise.”

Even though he’s got Harold in his ear, saying he saw the intruder leave through the telescope and he knows nobody’s up there now, Fusco still feels nervous climbing the stairs. Feels like every corner he rounds could have something sinister behind it. But there’s no one. It’s not even disturbed. The door’s unlocked, but it was unlocked when he left it.

Inside is a whole other story.

Speaking as somebody with an academic understanding of the term: the place is flipped. Cupboards and drawers are opened, empty. Bookshelves stripped bare. Mattress and blankets on the floor. Bed and desk and anything else movable yanked away from the wall to see if anything’s hidden behind. The floor is a sea of discarded cans and paperback novels and papers and trail mix and Polaroids and blankets and smeared, unreadable footprints.

Two things jump out at him right away.

First, nothing’s really destroyed. You do that when you’re flipping a place, either on purpose to scare the shit out of someone or by accident, just in the heat of the thing. Fusco feels like at least one package of food should be busted open on the floor, just as a law of averages type of thing, but there’s not one. Even the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle is moved from its hiding place to the counter, safe out of harm’s way.

Second, nothing much seems taken. Just as he cleans up the place, he thinks maybe he had more rice before, maybe there’s a spice or two missing from the stale, mismatched collection, maybe that bookshelf is a little emptier than before. But he left his wallet in a desk drawer and he finds that flopped open on the floor, not short so much as an old receipt. And there’s the Pappy Van Winkle, untouched and pristine. And there’s the gun, sitting atop the bare frame of the cot, shiny and unmissable. They saw that, whoever they are. They saw that and they passed it over.

He doesn’t realize the third thing until later, after he’s picked up the worst of the mess and made something that’s either a late lunch or an early dinner, after he’s preparing to go down to the outhouse to get a broom and sweep up a little before it gets too dark.  He’s on his way out the door, shoes in hand, when he stops dead.

His corkboard isn’t looking its best right now. It was knocked down during whatever the hell happened in here and he had to rehang the map with its careful markings of ransacked campsites and the associated Polaroids are all in a stack on the desk, ready to be reorganized and repinned. Fusco was so busy looking at the wall he forgot to look down at the floor.

Well, he’s looking now, at the perfect dusty boot prints, toes pointed towards the corkboard, like somebody stood perfectly still here a long while, looking at his handiwork.

Somebody wearing boots with treads like clovers.

* * *

He walks. Not anyplace in particular. Jesus Christ, where would he go? It was already getting dark when he climbed the steps up to the tower. It’s pitch black now. Thoroughfare Tower is the closest by far, he knows, but it’s a long hike along treacherous paths that’ll take him way up in the mountains. He’d be nervous about taking that hike in broad daylight. In the dark, it’s a one-way ticket to being a corpse at the bottom of a ravine somewhere, forgotten and picked over by birds.

Of course, the way things are going, that could happen just as easy if he stays right where he is.

Harold doesn’t think so. “ _Please_ don’t leave your lookout at this hour, Lionel. It’s not safe.”

“ _This_ is not safe,” Lionel hisses into the radio as he continues pacing around the edge of the tower cab, swatting at the insects that flit around his ears. “What the fuck am I supposed to do, hang out and wait for this guy to come kill me? In this shitty wooden tower with only one entrance? Great fucking plan, Harold.”

“If he wanted to kill you, Lionel,” Harold says, slow and patient and fucking _irritating_ , “he would have done it by now. He’s had ample opportunity.”

Even through the fog of his panic, there’s a tiny part of Fusco that takes a weird kind of comfort from that. It’s pragmatic, he guesses. The guy could have waited for Fusco to come home and killed him. The guy could’ve killed him at the stream. This guy - and it seems like it’s _this_ guy - has been raiding campsites for weeks. He takes food. He wrecks shit, sometimes. He watches people. He doesn’t kill people. He doesn’t even hurt them. Murder’s not a part of his pattern.

Of course, Fusco thinks, he hasn’t been looking into this suspect all that long. Maybe the pattern of the last few weeks is an anomaly and cold-blooded murder is the norm. And Fusco knows for a fact that people who murder don’t start out murderers. They end up that way. There was a lot of time in his own life, years and months and days and hours and minutes, where he wasn’t a murderer. That wasn’t because he didn’t have it in him. It was just because he hadn’t done it yet.

For the guy out there in the dark, this could be the hour before. Or the minute.

Fusco squints out into the dark, looking for any movement, listening for any rustle of leaves. He sees movement, small and persistent and all around him. He hears leaves rustling, branches cracking, bugs and birds and bats and whatever else. None of it tells him anything. There’d be sound and movement whether the guy was out there or not.

Fusco shudders. He feels like there are eyes on him. Because, of course, there are.

“I don’t see him,” Harold says.

“Yeah, but how well can you see?” Fusco asks, resting his elbows on the rail and staring out into the dark. “You couldn’t tell him and me apart.”

“I can see _people_ ,” Harold says. “Perhaps not in great detail, but I can see human shapes. I can see you now, at the rail.”

He can see Harold too, kinda. The blocky shape of a lookout, a tiny square of bright yellow light shining at the top of the dark mountains, fighting against the purple gloom. He’s in there somewhere, within that tiny square. Safe and sound, the fucker.

“Yeah, but I’m in the light,” Fusco says, because he is. All the lights in his lookout are blazing, ‘cause why wouldn’t they be. “Could you see somebody sneaking around out there in the dark?”

Harold hesitates.

“OK,” Fusco says.

“I’ve called the National Forest Service,” Harold says. “They’re aware of the situation. I’m just not sure they’ll have much of an effect. Certainly not a timely effect.”

“I know,” Fusco says, drumming his fingers on the railing. “I know it’s not as easy as sending a car and two unis around to keep an eye on things.”

“Would you like me to stay up with you?” Harold asks.

It’s tempting. Someone to talk to might be the line between spending the night pounding coffee to reach the morning, groggy but alive, and spending the whole night driving himself crazy, jumping at shadows.

But if something goes wrong, there’s nothing Harold can do. If something goes wrong, there are a few things Fusco can do that he wouldn’t want Harold knowing about. The gun presses into his lower back, tucked inside his waistband.

“You know what?” he says, after a long, long pause. “I think I’ll be OK.”

“No,” Harold says, softly.

“No, really. You’re right, this guy just steals food. I got no real reason to be afraid of him. He’s probably miles away by now and twice as spooked as I am ‘cause he got a load of my crazy crime scene board.”

“Which no one asked you to make, by the way.”

“Even spookier.” Fusco takes a deep breath. “Get some sleep, Harold. I’ll be fine. And if I’m dead in the morning...well, you’ll know what happened.”

“That’s not funny, Lionel.”

“Good night, Harold.”

Conversation over. Fusco sighs, sets the radio on the railing, next to his elbows. There’s still light over the mountains, faint and tinged in pink, fringing the craggy peaks. The last light he has to see by. Should seem more ominous. But he’s not thinking about being murdered anymore.

He’s thinking about what kind of person lives in the woods.

People with something to hide from. That’s what Fusco’s doing out here. People who like nature and the quiet. People who can’t hack it out there in the real world.

Now what kind of person steals from campsites? Fusco doesn’t think he hunts. He thinks he’d find dead deer, stripped of meat and left to skeletonize, or arrows fired from a crossbow weeks before, now hidden in grass or buried in tree trunks. Somebody who wasn’t up to hunting or foraging might steal food, but somebody who couldn’t hunt and couldn’t forage wouldn’t stay out here. Not for long. Not so quietly, aside from this.

Somebody lonely, he thinks. Somebody lonely might.

Somebody who hasn’t spoken to a human being in a long goddamn time, somebody who hasn’t seen civilization in longer, somebody who needs to walk among sleeping people, to hold something canned or injection-molded and made of plastic in their hands just to remind themselves that they’re not the only human being left on earth. Somebody might do that.

Fusco goes back into the cab of the tower. He gets two thick jelly-jar glasses, pinches them together between his fingers, and with his other hand he picks up the Pappy Van Winkle.

This is a bad idea.

He pushes the door open with his shoulder and heads outside.

It’s a warm-enough night, he thinks. There have been a few where he had to curl up under every blanket in the lookout, where it took some convincing to get him to put his feet on the wooden floors in the morning. This is a thick, syrupy kind of heat, loud with birds and bugs. It won’t get cold until real late at night.

Good night for company, he thinks.

Fusco takes the stairs in the dark, gingerly. It’s amazing how small his bubble of light is, how quickly it recedes as he sneaks his way down the steps, boards groaning under his boots. It’s alright, he’s only going as far as the first landing, where the stairs turn around the edge of the tower.

“If you’re out there - and that’s a pretty big if,” he begins, as his feet fall heavy on the landing, “- but if you are, you could be a little more social.” He crouches, sets one of the glasses in the center of the step, just before the turn. Just in case the guy might be crouched there on the steps, waiting. “Noticed you were careful not to break the bottle,” Fusco says, loud as he can while still sounding breezy, casual. Like his heart isn’t hammering in his chest. “Figured you might as well join me for a drink, if you’re gonna hang around all night.”

Fusco takes the cork in his teeth, pulls until it comes free with a satisfying pop. He pours a little in the glass, just enough to sip on. Then he pours himself one. It’s a little heavier and as he pours, his hand wavers. A little whiskey spills over his wrist. He lifts the glass to his lips like he’s gonna drink it, really believes he will up until it touches his lower lip and then he’s just frozen there a moment, letting the smell of it burn his nose. He lowers the glass again without taking a sip.

“No ice,” he says to the dark. “Sorry, but...you know.”

He lets _you know_ hang suspended in the muggy air, jockeying for elbow room among the chirping of insects. He listens for the creaking of a stair.

The tower does groan, a little. But the tower groans all the time.

“I’m gonna head back up to the top to drink mine,” he calls out into the dark. “If you want to let yours get hot, that’s on you.”

He makes his way back up the stairs backwards, watching as the little glass in the center of the landing fades into murk, as he climbs up through the top of the platform and over the edge so he couldn’t have seen it, even in broad daylight. Right in front of the door is where the light is brightest, where he feels like he could make the fastest escape, if he needed to. Fusco sits on the very edge of the platform, head ducking under the handrail, legs dangling off into space. He sets the bottle beside him, holds his glass in his lap, and watches the dark trees sway below him, watches the whiskey ripple in the breeze. As he sits, he listens.

It takes a long time. Not sure how long, he only glances at his watch twice before it becomes unbearable. Long enough for his ass to really start to hurt from sitting on wooden boards. Long enough for his neck to be bumpy with bug bites. Long enough for the air to cool down, for the hairs on his arms to stand up. Long enough for him to raise the glass of whiskey to his lips ten or fifteen times and just let it hang there, like a tease.

Long enough to let him really get used to the sounds of the Shoshone at night, to pick them all apart. That’s the sound the pines make when they rasp together, when their branches thrash in the wind. That’s the sound an insect he can’t see makes, one long, continuous scream. The low hoot of an owl. The shriek of a coyote. The sounds of the tower shifting almost imperceptibly in the wind. And then the first creak on the steps, which is a new sound.

And then another.

And then another.

It’s the closest he comes to downing the whiskey. The only thing that stops him is the fear that he’ll be too drunk to defend himself.

If Fusco wasn’t so used to the noise the Shoshone makes at night, he might not have made out the words. The voice is softer than he expects, low and smooth, a quiet rasp like a heavy boot sliding in soft, fine sand. It says, “There’s a bug in mine.”

He feels his every nerve light up, blazing. “Well, fish it out,” Fusco says, sounding enough like his heart isn’t in his throat. “I don’t waste good whiskey.”

The voice falls silent again and Fusco wonders if he actually heard anything at all, if he’s stitching together a human voice out of wind and the calls of insects just so he has someone to talk to, just so the dark will answer back.

But then it comes again, still soft and raspy but too plain and clear to be anything but a human voice, a man’s voice. “It’s nice of you to offer,” he says. “I didn’t expect that.”

“What were you expecting?” Fusco asks him.

“Fear,” he answers. “I thought you’d hide. Or you’d leave. Or you’d shoot me. I left you your gun.”

“I have it,” Fusco says, a gentle warning.

Very calmly, he says, “I know.” His voice floats in the dark: “Are you going to try to shoot me, Lionel?”

Fusco doesn’t like that _try_. There’s a sly, smarting arrogance to it that makes Fusco long to take a shot at him, just to make a point. And Fusco’s a pretty decent shot. He likes less that the man in the dark knows his name, used it real casual, like they’re old drinking buddies. That makes him want to take a shot for certainty’s sake, just to get rid of the problem for better or for worse.

In the end, he lets the question hang. He’s not quite decided on whether he wants to shoot the man in the dark, and that bothers him almost as much as the name thing. Instead he asks, “What are you doing out here?”

The man in the dark breathes deep and thoughtful. “Could ask you the same question. You don’t belong out here.”

“Maybe so, but I asked you first,” Fusco says. “Why’d you break into my tower? Why are you hanging around down there in the dark?”

“That’s a lot of questions,” he says, mildly.

“It’s not. It’s the same question three times.”

His chuckle floats up through the stairwell like a plume of smoke. “I wanted to see if my beer was still here.”

Fusco fiddles with his glass, rolls it in his hand. “So that was _your_ beer?”

The voice murmurs assent.

“Did you take it from Sameen’s lookout? Wapiti?”

Silence. Affronted, telling silence.

“So you were here last summer too,” Fusco murmurs thoughtfully. “Have you been stealing from campsites all this time, or is this a new thing?”

“You should answer my question now,” the man in the dark deflects. “Why are _you_ here?”

“Me?” Given he’s just been all through Fusco’s tower, Fusco’s not sure what else this guy would want to know about him or why he’d want to know it. “I’m on vacation,” he answers.

“On vacation with a gun?”

“People bring guns with them on vacation. For hunting.”

Fusco can hear him smirk. “People bring _hunting rifles_ with them for hunting. And they don’t hunt in the Shoshone.”

“Not even you?”

“Not even me,” he says. And then, almost shyly, “That’s why I take from campsites.”

“Yeah?”

“You start poaching in a protected forest, people take notice. I don’t like attention.”

“People are paying attention now.”

“Just you,” he says, gently. “You hike slowly.”

“Been following me?”

“You’ve been following _me_. Sometimes I follow back.” Then, very softly, “Why are you out here, Lionel?”

His heartbeat flickers. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you throwing my name around. Do I get to know yours?”

“Answer the question,” he says, which is a firm ‘no’ by Fusco’s reckoning, although he never expected handshakes and introductions. Even this much conversation is a surprise.

Not unwelcome, though. Sad to think about, but this cagey, tense conversation with a stranger down a dark staircase is the most human interaction he’s had in some time. The people whose raided campsites he looks after don’t talk to him, exactly. He’s more a tin can telephone for them to scream their problems into. And Harold, Sameen, Joss, Root: he likes them, he does, but they’re just on the radio. They don’t seem real.

This man, whoever he is, is here. He’s bone and blood. He’s real enough to drink whiskey and make the stairs creak. That matters to Fusco, in some pathetic way. It makes him answer more honestly than he intends. “I needed a break from my life. Someplace where I won’t have to talk to anybody. And someplace where nobody would think to look for me.”

“Am I disturbing your rest?”

“The break-in,” Fusco says, “was a fucking disturbance. I’d rather you don’t pull that shit again.” He sets the glass down, rubs his hands together. “But I don’t care so much that you swipe shit from campsites. Doesn’t seem to hurt anybody too bad and it gives me something to do while I’m out here. And don’t mind having someone to talk to, either.”

The darkness is ponderous, silent. Fusco wonders if his new drinking buddy vanished while he was talking, using Fusco’s droning as a cover. _Too eager to spill your guts_ , Fusco chides himself.

For the sake of conversation, Fusco asks, “How’s that whiskey treating you?”

“Very well, heat and bugs aside. How’s it treating you, Lionel?”

“It’s, uh,” he begins. “It isn’t. I’m not drinking.”

“You gave the beer away,” the dark says, probing gently for that weak spot.

 _He knew I didn’t have the beer_ , Fusco thinks to himself. The excuse was already bullshit, but this makes it concrete. “I’m trying out, uh. Staying sober. For once.”

“You have a glass in your hand.”

“I’m trying, but it’s _hard_.”

“You made it harder for yourself. I don’t know very much about you, _Lionel_ ,” and he leans on his name hard, deliberate, to show he already knows too much, “but I know you don’t waste good whiskey.”

“No.” _He must be listening to the lookouts on the radio,_ he thinks. _I bet that’s how he knows._

“Seems like you set yourself up.”

His head dips lower. “Yeah.”

“I used to have a drinking problem,” the man in the dark says, almost casually.

“How’d you kick it?”

“I came out here.”

“Seems like I’m on the road to success, then.” And then, “Hey, did you get what you needed?”

The dark stays silent, perhaps questioning.

“When you broke into the tower, I mean. I know you were stashing the beer here. Probably the whiskey too. I can’t give you the beer back, but if there’s something else you were after, I can leave it out here for you.”

The voice in the dark comes after a long pause: “No.” And then, “A few books, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” Fusco says, voice slack and easy, as if he really had been drinking. “Which ones?”

“I don’t care.” He sounds almost sullen. “Surprise me.”

“You got it, Tall, Dark and Creepy.” Fusco leans back on his hands, head tilted back, eyes on the moon, corn yellow and heavy over the mountains. “What made you stick around, then?”

“Hmm?”

“If there wasn’t anything else you wanted. You already tossed the place, you knew I was looking for you, you knew I had a gun. Why stick around?”

The voice is thick, warm with the edge of a laugh: “I’m not worried about your gun, Lionel.” After a few moments he remarks again, gentle and thoughtful, “I’m not sure why I stayed. Maybe I wanted a conversation.”

“Well, you’re a hell of a conversationalist.”

“Thank you, Lionel. We should talk more.”

“Sure.”

“152.42.”

“What?”

“152.42. My radio is usually tuned to that frequency. If you’d like to talk. Harold doesn’t know about it.”

“But you know about Harold?”

“Of course I know about Harold,” he says. “Harold talks more than any of you.”

The theory that he listens to them on the radio is feeling pretty solid right about now. “Take it you don’t want Harold to know about this little chat either?”

“Like I said,” the voice murmurs, “I want to live quiet.”

Being told to keep quiet about the talk sets off alarm bells in Fusco’s head. Somebody who wants you quiet like that has designs that hang on your silence. That’s something he’s learned. But if he were to tell Harold about tonight, his new friend would likely overhear. He doesn’t know how well this guy will take betrayal. Fusco guesses he’ll take it bad. Smarter to keep his mouth shut, to pick this guy apart slowly, kindly, disarm him word by word.

And he’s been that guy who needed silence. Scummy as it is, he relates.

“Suit yourself,” Fusco says. He rises to his feet with a groan, listens for scrambling on the floor below. He doesn’t hear it, but he bets the guy jerked to his feet, poised to bolt or attack. Fusco stretches slow and deliberate to show he’s not a threat.

“I’m gonna leave my glass outside,” he says. “You can have my share if you want; just leave the glass behind once you’re done. I’m gonna go inside, grab some books off the shelf, and bring ‘em out here for you. Then I’m gonna go back inside the tower and go straight to bed. OK?”

“OK,” says the voice in the dark. He sounds faintly apprehensive, like he’s not sure if it’s a trap.

“Gonna put my glass right on the edge of the stairs. I’m doing that now.” There’s a faint scuffle of feet and when Fusco peers down the steps as he bends to place the whiskey, he sees nothing, just splintery wooden stairs fading into dark. He steps back.

“I’m getting your books now. Sit tight.”

This’ll be the test, he thinks as he opens the door. This guy thinks Fusco’s guard is down, that he’s dancing around the guy’s worries about being seen. If he doesn’t come racing up the stairs after Fusco, doesn’t tackle him to the floor or hit him over the head with a rock or slide a knife between his ribs, that means he wants Fusco alive, at least for now. And if he does, well. He doesn’t know about the gun in Fusco’s waistband. Although if he has a brain in his head, he’s probably guessed. And Fusco’s pretty sure there’s a brain in there.

 _So I’m fucked_ , he thinks as he selects paperbacks with worn spines from the bookshelf, but the guy doesn’t come up the stairs, so it’s all conjecture.

He’s not on the platform either when Fusco steps back out into the night. “Still there?” he calls.

His voice floats from below: “I am.”

“OK,” he says, squinting at titles in the gloom. “I got you, uh, _Terminal Seven_ , _The Accidental Savior_ , and _One Chance to Die_. Sound alright?”

“Sounds fine. Are they any good?”

“Dunno. Haven’t read any of them.”

“I’ll return them when I’m done.”

“Sure, whenever. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“You’d be a terrible librarian, Lionel.”

Fusco stacks the books next to his glass of whiskey. “Good thing for both of us that I’m not a librarian.” And then, “So, what now?”

“Now?”

“I go to bed, you come up and get your books and...then what? You sit down there in the dark all night?”

“I go home.”

“Is it safe? To hike in the dark out here?”

“Not for you,” he says. “But I do it all the time.”

“You gonna keep stealing from campsites?”

“You’d be bored if I didn’t.”

“Just tone it down a little, huh? If you want to keep living quiet. That or get better at pretending to be a bear.”

“I’ll think about it,” he says. “Goodnight, Lionel.”

“Goodnight, creep.”

“Creep?” the voice says, faintly amused. “I thought we had a nice talk.”

“Maybe so, but I got nothing else to call you, pal. So creep it is.”

“Fair enough,” he says. “Sleep well.”

“Sure,” Fusco says. “Get home safe.”

Fusco, of course, sleeps like garbage. He can’t afford to sleep any other way then flat on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, ears pricked for the creaking of the stairs, eyes straining for a change in the way the shadows play over the ceiling and the walls. Of course he hears creaking and of course the shadows change, but there’s nothing definitive, nothing that makes him sit up, clutching the gun he keeps under his pillow.

By the time pale daylight pours weakly into the room, he’s almost sure it was some kind of weird, drunken dream, that the guy never would’ve stayed to talk with him, that Fusco never would have been brave enough to invite him up for a drink. He’d almost believe that, too, if it wasn’t for the two glasses, left side by side at the top of the stairs, clean and faintly wet, like they’ve been rinsed under the spigot.

The books, of course, are gone.


	5. DAY 41

Things almost stay the same. 

He radios Harold the morning after to report that he’s still alive and Harold congratulates him on making it through the night. The other lookouts chime in, sympathizing and swapping stories of the time a hiker broke into their lookout, of the scariest person they ever met in the wilderness. After that, people check in every once in a while - has he seen the guy again? - but not very often and less and less as the days go by. Even the campsite thefts seem to vanish, but maybe it’s just that the thief is being subtler about what he takes.

Mostly, the thing that changes is him. When he hears a twig snap behind him on the trail, when he’s lying in bed and the tower creaks just a little too loud, when he’s bathing at the spigot and he becomes too aware of how vulnerable he is and of how many steps lie between him and his gun, he remembers there’s someone else out there, potentially watching him. Not exactly hunting him.

The big difference is that sometimes he’ll get off the party line and swing the radio dial to unexplored frequencies. He expects to pick up rangers, campers, kids with walkie talkies, but mostly he just finds a lot of unclaimed real estate, a lot of static and dead silence. One little patch of quiet is the frequency his new pal told him about. Fusco started tuning in the day after their first chat, curious if the creep would really be on there waiting for him, curious if he’d have the balls to answer if the creep spoke to him. That’s all maybes and hypotheticals; the guy’s never said a word.

That is, until the day he does. 

Fusco’s hiking through the canyon when it happens. He has nothing to do today, no assignments, not a twist of smoke in the clear blue sky, but he ought to stretch his legs even so, and he likes to sit on the warm red rocks and eat his lunch, take his shoes off and wade around in the shallows of Jonesy Lake. That’s an easy hike now. He hardly thinks about it anymore. He’s noticing muscle definition in his calves, his thighs that he’s pretty sure wasn’t there before. 

He’s almost to the rock when his radio lets out a chirp of static and he barely notices it until he remembers he left it tuned to Radio Creep. Sure enough, he speaks, his voice made softer and cracklier by the radio: “You busy, Lionel?”

Fusco lifts the radio to his cheek. “If you’ve been following me around - and you have - then you know I’m not.”

“Have you been up to Beartooth Point yet?”

He hasn’t. It’s in the upper right corner of his map, so far away it’s closer to Harold’s lookout than his. The colors on the topographical map get real threatening around that area. He pretty much wrote it off. “Not yet,” he says. “Why?”

“Hell of a view. Especially on a day like today.”

That sounds eerily like an invitation. “You should go,” Fusco says. “Carpe diem, or whatever.”

“I am.” The voice hesitates. If Fusco listens hard, he can hear its breath shiver. “I’d like some company.”

Fusco’s first thought is that going on a long hike in the middle of nowhere with a mysterious stranger is a good way to get yourself killed. His second thought is that he’s already in the middle of nowhere with a mysterious stranger, and it’s hard to see how a canyon in the middle of nowhere is safer than a mountain in the middle of nowhere. If anything, he’s closer to help.

And he has nothing to do today. No one to do it with.

His finger settles over the button. “Sure,” Fusco says, “where do I meet you?”

“I’m here.”

Fusco falls absolutely quiet, listens for rock-on-rock, scans the tops of the canyons for shadows peering over the edge. “You, uh. You comin’ out?”

“No.” And then, “We’re losing daylight.”

So Fusco starts walking.

He knows the way up to a point. He’d almost have to with all this time on his hands with nothing to do but hike and read maps and almanacs. He thinks of Beartooth Point as up and over. It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s how he starts. “Feel free to chime in,” Fusco says all the same as he climbs over a fallen tree, “if you know a better way.”

“This is fine,” he says. “But I’ll speak up if you take a wrong turn.”

“Thanks,” Fusco says as his boots hit the ground. “You do this hike a lot?”

A thoughtful pause. “No. But I like it.”

“Just needed the excuse? Of company, I mean.”

“Something like that.”

“Did you hike a lot before?”

Silence.

“Before you started living out here, I mean.”

“Not for fun,” he says. 

Fusco wonders what that means, but guesses it’s too early to ask, too easy to spook this guy. “So this is retirement for you, I guess.”

“Something like that,” he says again. And then, apropos of nothing: “You’re from the Bronx.”

“You’ve been listening to us,” Fusco remarks. “And remembering. I said where I was from weeks ago.”

“There’s not much else out here to do.”

Fusco can’t really argue with that. 

“What made you come so far, Lionel? They have mountains on the East Coast too.”

“Yeah.” Not that he’s ever climbed those either. He thought about it, though, when it first came time to hide. He’d thought about the White Mountains in New Hampshire, about lobstermen in Maine, about a hundred ways to disappear. It was all too close for comfort and too costly. He needed distance. He needed a job. “But they don’t have firewatchers.”

That seems to satisfy him. 

“What about you?” Fusco asks. “Not that I’m any kind of expert, but I guess there are a lot of forests out there. Why’d you pick this one to live in?”

Silence. Fusco listens hard, is infuriated by the fact that the man doesn’t seem to make any noise at all as he walks through the woods. He must be close, Fusco thinks. Not within grabbing distance, but close enough to follow. A man who walks in the woods should make a noise: snap a twig, crunch a leaf, make the grass shake. This man doesn’t.

“Did you used to live  _ near  _ here?” Fusco speculates.

“No one lives near here.”

That’s true enough. “In the state, I mean.”

“No.”

So that narrows it down, then. He’s not from Wyoming. Unless he’s lying. “So, what,” Fusco tries again, “did you come out here for a vacation and decide to make it permanent?”

He makes a soft, considering sound. “Something like that. We’re going off-trail here, Lionel.”

Fusco comes to a careful stop. He’d been following the trail marked on his map pretty well, he thought. The trail ahead curves to circumvent a large rock formation and Fusco’s not in a climbing mood. “Where are we going?”

“On your right, Lionel.”

On his right is no path, dry grass, and gravel. Beyond that is a flat, red rock face, smooth and - as far as Fusco is concerned - unclimbable. “You’re going to have to show me, pal,” he says.

He snorts, like Fusco just said something funny. “Just start walking. You’ll see what I mean.”

Gingerly, Fusco steps through the grasses, lets the gravel crunch underfoot. He presses his palm against the rock face, finds it warm from the sun.

“To your left,” says the man, “and look down.”

Fusco obeys, inches a little further to the left, and spots a hole about two feet high and five feet long, a dark gap where the rock formation meets the ground. Fusco sinks to his knees. He sees nothing, just sandstone fading into blackness. He can feel a cool breeze coming up out of the earth.

He lifts the radio to his lips. “Absolutely not.”

“It’s a shortcut,” the man says.

“Have you seen this thing?”

“Of course.” He sounds vaguely offended. “I brought you here.”

“I’m not gonna fit.”

“You will,” he insists. “It widens out once you’re inside.”

Fusco lowers his head, leans forward into the space. He smells something he’s never smelled before, musty and ancient and cold. He jerks his head away. “Not to start throwing accusations around,” Fusco says, “but going into a creepy cave with a mysterious stranger whose face I’ve never seen seems like a bad idea.”

“It isn’t creepy,” he says, breezing right past Fusco’s other points. “There are gates and old light fixtures down there. There’s practically a gift shop.”

Fusco squints at the slim hole as he fiddles around in his pack for a flashlight. “Tight fit for a tourist trap.”

“It’s an unconventional entrance,” he admits, “to an extremely conventional cave. You’ll see. Go in head first, it’ll be easier."

He hesitates a moment, slides his hands down the smooth sides of the crevice, which suddenly seems like a hairline crack in the rock, an impossibly tight fit.

“I won’t let you get stuck,” the man says. “You won’t get stuck, but if you do, I won’t let you stay that way.”

“Thanks, pal,” Fusco mutters under his breath as he clicks the flashlight on. It does seem to be wider ahead and he allows his arms and head to slide into the cave. He has to suck his gut in a little, has to inch and army crawl a few feet, but the crevice curves, widens, and spits him out onto a ledge. He points the flashlight up, finds stone ceiling. Points the flashlight down, finds floor about six feet below him, flat and stable. 

“Keep going.” The man floats up behind him, made muffled and strange by the crevice. “I’ll follow.”

That’s his real voice, not the radio. Means he’s right outside, just feet away. Fusco’s tempted to lunge back up the tunnel and burst out face to face with the guy, but he figures that’s a good way to get himself murdered in a cave, which is exactly what he’s trying to avoid. Or else the guy would hear him coming and hide himself in the forest again and Fusco would just be alone again, an idiot in a hole.

Anyway, better to keep moving. For now. Fusco lowers himself from the ledge and onto the smooth floor of the cave.

It takes his eyes a little while to adjust, but he’s soon able to pick out the features of the cave a little easier. It’s a hallway, basically. A big, rocky hallway. Muted, cool, and dark. The walls are craggy, but the floor is worn smooth, as if by thousands of tourist boots. Sure enough, he sees as he trails his flashlight high on the walls and the ceiling, there are old, tired, busted up lights affixed to the walls, strung together with rotting cord.

There’s a sudden burst of scuffling behind him, and he almost turns to look when the guy snarls, “Eyes front, Lionel.” So he keeps his eyes front, waits while the guy behind him gets situated.

“You can keep walking now,” he says after a little bit.

“So, what was this before?” Fusco asks, by way of conversation.

“Depends on what you consider before,” he says. “The cave system was created by water deep beneath the earth thousands of years ago…”

Fusco interrupts, “Yeah, I meant like the lights and the tourists.”

“Oh.” A few moments of their footsteps bouncing around the cave. “This cave system used to be really popular with hikers. Made it into a few big guidebooks. But - turn left here,” he says, as they come to a fork in the cave. Left is a continuation of the big smooth tunnel, while right is a small, craggy hole that Fusco guesses probably goes straight to hell, so he’s fine with that direction. “But people died down here. Not in this part of the cave,” he adds, interrupting Fusco’s wave of panic, “but there are less safe parts of the cave system. Tried to modernize it with the lights in the main tunnel and everything, but there’s no real way to monitor it, no staff or anything. People would die or get trapped or get injured...it became so common that they shut it down, gated it off.”

“So how are we here?” Fusco asks.

“We’re gated off,” the man says. “Or we used to be. See?”

Sure enough, there’s an iron gate across the tunnel ahead of him, blocking their path. “Shit,” Fusco says. “What now?”

“Keep going. You’ll see.”

The gate’s old and rusty, fitted to the tunnel space with no particular care. Fusco figures a thin person could squeeze through the gaps, a strong person - a  _ really  _ strong person - could maybe kick the door down. And a smart person, he realizes with a soft chuckle, would notice that the padlock holding the door shut had been cut through. He plucks out the lock, pushes the door open with a scream of rusty hinges. “Did you do that?” Fusco asks.

“I came across some bolt cutters,” he answers modestly. 

They step out into an even bigger, even broader tunnel. It’s immediately warmer and Fusco thinks he can smell fresh air. 

“This is the only part that’s still open,” says the man in the dark, over the screech and clang of him shutting the gate again. “It’s so safe and the entrance is so big, it’s not worth gating off. Look to your right?”

Fusco obeys, sees that the tunnel winds away into the earth.

“If you follow that to the end, there’s an exit that comes out near your tower. It’s a shortcut.”

“Good to know,” Fusco murmurs. He can’t imagine ever that being that desperate for a shortcut.

They turn left, and in less than a mile, they step out of the broad cavern and into afternoon sunlight. 

“What now?” Fusco asks, blinking as his eyes adjust to the light.

“Keep heading north,” says the man from somewhere just inside the tunnel. Suddenly, he adds: “I should warn you.”

Fusco tenses up. “Yeah?”

“Another reason they shut down the caves is that it was impossible to radio for help in them,” he says. “You can’t get a signal down there.”

“ _ Jesus _ .”

“I knew it would have worried you if I told you before we entered the cave or while we were inside. But it is important to know.”

“Jesus  _ Christ _ , man.”

Somewhere behind him, the guy kicks up gravel as he walks. “Be happy, Lionel. We just shaved three miles off our journey by walking one mile through a cave.”

He guesses that  _ is  _ something to be happy about

He’ll be happier about that in the next few miles. At first, he was too intrigued to be tired: too nervous, too excited, too curious. Too busy worrying about the cave to remember to be worried about how far it is to Beartooth Point. Over grassy fields and deep forests and rocky crags, he thinks a lot about how far it is to Beartooth Point, first in miles, then in half-miles, in quarter-miles, in tenths of a mile. He wants to see progress, but it seems like the more he divides up the distance remaining, the further it is. His breath comes short. The muscles in his legs are somehow as hard as rock and as loose as rubber bands at the same time. There’s a feeling like a knife between his ribs. His mind narrows to one foot, then the other, then the first foot, then the other, and by the time he collapses on a large, flat rock near the trail, even that seems too complex.

“We almost there?” he asks, panting. 

“A little over halfway.”

Fusco groans, flops backwards onto the rock. 

“Struggling, Lionel?”

“Yeah,” he says, hand over his eyes, radio pressed almost to his mouth. “A little bit. I don’t  _ do  _ stuff like this.”

“I never would have guessed.”

“Fuck off,” Fusco says. It’s then that he realizes, belatedly, that his friend hasn’t used the radio at all since they left the caves. For his voice to come so clear and loud, he must be very close by. Fusco sits up, squinting into the gloom beneath the trees. He sees the shapes of trees, of bushes, of fallen logs, but nothing that looks human.

“You didn’t tell  _ them  _ that,” he says in his voice that floats, that seems to come from nowhere at all.

“No,” Fusco agrees. He stands up, causes a tiny landslide of gravel as his boots shift, slip just a little. “I didn’t think they’d like that. Being nature people and all. Think they’d think I didn’t belong.”

“And me?”

He takes a few steps closer to the edge of the path. “I think you think it’s interesting. I don’t know why.”

“I guess I’m just curious why you’d do this to yourself. If you don’t enjoy it.”

“I do enjoy it,” Fusco protests. “I know I complain a lot, but…”

“Did you expect to?”

Fusco considers. “No.” And then, “I fucked up, OK? I needed to get away for a little while. That’s all.”

“OK,” he says, softly. “Me too.”

Fusco’s defensiveness fades a little. “OK.” He takes a long swig from his water bottle and after a while, he’s ready to start walking again.

There’s a thing they say about second winds and he guesses that’s a real thing, because it’s easier now. The pulsing in his muscles becomes a low background hum and his breathing evens out, becomes easier with each inhalation. There’s the thinning of the air, yeah, but there’s also the way the light goes gold as the afternoon wears on, the rocks all red and radiating warmth. There’s that spike of adrenaline when he looks up the path and sees no trees, only rock and sky, and knows he must be close. 

He’s not  _ that  _ close, he finds, inching his way up the steepest incline, hands and feet seeking out crevices in the rock to hoist himself up. But he’s closer than he was a couple hours ago. He’s closer than he ever expected to be. 

When he crests the peak, sees the world spread out before him, he almost drops. He doesn’t. He sinks a little, rests his hands on his knees, panting speechlessly.

“It’s worth it, isn’t it?” crackles the voice over the radio. 

Fusco just laughs. He can’t help it, it’s all he can do with the air that’s left in his lungs. It’s unreal. It’s like something you see in a book or a magazine, something big and beautiful that definitely exists or there wouldn’t be a picture, but too remote to really believe in unless you saw it with your own eyes.  Who could believe in the richness of the red, sandy rock, in the dark texture of the fir trees, dappled by clusters of yellow-leaved aspens, in the way lakes and rivers shine like new coins in the light, in the shift of clouds overhead, rippling the sunlight.

He drops his pack with a soft thud and, quietly, he sinks to the ground. He stays that way for a long while, watching, listening, letting the wind whip through his hair and his clothes, drinking it all in. Once he gets his breath back, he eats a real late lunch.

“Is it true what they say,” he says into his radio after a while, “about food tasting better when you’re in the fresh air? Scientifically, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” the voice replies. “You’re probably just hungry.”

“That’s definitely true.” Fusco eats the last of his sandwich and rises to his feet, stretching deep. “I gotta take a picture,” he says.

A gentle snort. “Tourist.”

“Call me what you want,” he says, fumbling in his pack for the Polaroid, “but if I don’t get proof, my kid’s never gonna believe this.”

He slings the strap around his neck, brings the camera up to his eye, does his best to make the frame hold all he’s seeing, to bring some part of this back for Lee. When he can come back. If he can come back. He takes the picture.

“You’re a father, Lionel?” the voice asks as the camera spits out the white, undeveloped photograph.

Fusco sighs deep, takes the photo between two fingers. “Yeah.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Lee. He’s nine.”

“Where is he now?”

“Back home,” Fusco says. “With his mother.”

“You don’t have a ring,” the voice says.

“I’m not married.” Fusco sits on the edge, his back to the view. “I’m taking a picture of myself to prove I was here. You want in?”

“Think I’ll sit this one out, Lionel.”

“Could you take the picture for me, at least?”

“Only if you don’t mind having your eyes closed.”

“Jesus. Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

It’s a poor effort, probably, but he turns the camera on himself, holds it as far away from his body as it’ll go, tries to keep his thumbs out of the way. The camera spits another undeveloped photo at him and he takes the two together, fans himself with them gently.  

“You close by?” Fusco asks after a while.

“Close enough,” is the response.

“But not up here,” Fusco says, noting the bald rock that surrounds him. “Not looking at my view.”

“No,” the voice says. “But the view’s pretty good from anywhere.”

Fusco leans back on the rock, tucks his pack underneath his head. He blinks up at the blue sky, breathes in the fresh air, and lets his eyes sink shut. “Come on up,” he says. “My eyes are closed.”

It’s quiet for a long time, just the strong wind ruffling him, the sun keeping him warm. He hears birds sometimes, crying out as they wheel in the sky. Sometimes a cloud passes over, dims the brightness beyond his eyelids. He’s not sure how long he lies there. He thinks it could be hours. He knows it’s probably more like minutes. What he knows for certain is that after a while, he hears a boot scrape on the rock. Fusco tilts his face toward the disturbance, eyes still shut.

“They really are closed,” he hears the voice say, faint and wondering.

“You coming up or what?” Fusco asks.

The sound of his boots comes closer, a slow, cautious shuffle. They come to a stop near Fusco’s head and after a moment, the guy gingerly settles down beside Fusco. Up close, his gear jingles faintly. He almost stinks, like sweat and like something that got soaked with rain and never quite dried, but there’s a strength to it, a musk, a kind of peppery smell. He smells like an animal.

“I got no plans to open my eyes,” Fusco says, “for the record. You don’t have to worry.”

“Thank you.” His voice is still soft, but there’s a rumble underneath, like the purr of a big cat. 

“But I’ve already seen you. Haven’t I? By the stream?”

“Only for a second,” he admits.  

“Long enough,” Fusco protests.

“Describe me.”

“Tall,” Fusco begins. “Thin. Tan. Uh. Dirty?”

“It’s like you know me better than I know myself,” the voice says, deadpan.

Fusco thinks back to the ragged figure by the stream, the way his eyes shone bright in his battered face. “You have blue eyes,” he adds.

The amusement in his voice dies. “That’s already more than I want you to know.”

“I guess I don’t know why it’s such a big deal. Am I gonna recognize you? Are you famous?"

“No.”

“You sure you’re not a movie star? Pro athlete? Serial killer?”

“None of the above.”

“Well, what then? Are you ugly?”

“I’ve never thought so.”

“‘Cause take it from me - one ugly guy to another - it’s better to own it instead of doing...whatever this is. If you’d just shown up like a normal person, I’d be used to how you looked by now. Now I’m speculating about what might be so bad that I gotta keep my eyes shut. Like...anything less than a second head…”

The voice breaks through. “You’re not ugly, Lionel.”

“Maybe one big eye in the center of your forehead…”

There’s a sudden brush of fingers, someone roughly prodding at his cheek. “You’re not ugly,” he says again.

Fusco goes very still. The touch is already withdrawn, but Fusco can still feel him, the calluses on the pads of his fingers, the accidental scrape of his nails. And he knows, by the way, that he’s not ugly, that he’s just kind of an average person, a short and fat guy who looks like a lot of other short and fat guys. He just also knows that it’s funnier if he says he’s ugly, that he’s better off not caring too much about what he looks like. “Don’t give me any more reasons not to trust you, pal,” he says, mildly.

The person beside him administers a gentle kick to his shin. Then he tugs gently at the Polaroids pressed between Fusco’s fingers. “Can I see?”

Fusco hands them over wordlessly. 

There’s quiet, the sound of the two pictures sliding together. “These are nice,” he says after a while. “The ones in your tower were nice too. The ones of mountains and deer, not the ones of my bootprints. Do you take pictures back home?”

“You know I’m a cop,” Fusco says.

“Not for a living,” he says mildly. “I mean, ever.”

Fusco considers. “At work sometimes, on stakeouts. Of my kid. Not anything else, really. It’s not even my camera.”

“No,” he says.

“Is it yours? Or one you stole?”

He’s silent, ambiguous.

“You take pictures ever?” Fusco asks.

“Never as many as I mean to. Can I…?”

Fusco shrugs. “Go for it.”

He hears plastic scuff gently against rock as the camera gets picked up, startles when the camera snaps right near his face, loud

“You just take my picture?” Fusco asks, brow furrowed. 

“Was that wrong?”

“Not  _ wrong _ ,” Fusco says. “I mean I’m not thrilled. You get my good side?”

“Which one’s the good one?” he asks.

Fusco strikes out gently with his heel, taps what he thinks is shin. 

“Can I carry the camera on the way down?” the voice asks.

“Sure,” Fusco says. “Knock yourself out. You can take it back, if you want to. I’m not investigating you anymore.”

“I don’t want to keep it,” he says, gently. “I’ll give it back to you.”

“Then by all means,” Fusco says.

He takes the camera. There’s gentle rustling and Fusco imagines he put the camera around his neck, like the tourist he accused Fusco of being. They sit there together for a long while, drinking in the afternoon until the sun takes on an orange cast through Fusco’s eyelids.

“We should go,” the voice says. “We need to get you home before dark.”

“I got a curfew now?”

“Lionel…”

“I got it, I know. I’m just busting your balls a little. How do you want to do this?”

He hesitates. “Give me a one minute head start.”

“You got it,” Fusco says, sitting up, eyes still firmly shut. He counts out 60 seconds, calls ‘em out loud over the sounds of footsteps heading away. When 60 seconds have passed, he opens his eyes to find he’s alone on the top of the mountain. The world has taken on a washed-out, greenish cast. He blinks hard a few times, slings his pack over his shoulder, and gets going. 

It’s worse on the way down. He’s noticed that about mountains. You’d think it’d be easier ‘cause you aren’t throwing down with the law of gravity, but it turns out gravity wants you face down on the rock, and the half-measure of creeping down the incline sideways like a crab, knees bent, arms out and ready for impact, really pisses gravity off.

“Sorry I’m going so slow,” Fusco calls out loud, not bothering with the radio.

In a voice that sounds closer than Fusco expected it to, he replies, “Take your time.”

He hears the cheerful snap of a Polaroid and it takes all of his self control not to whip his head in that direction. “Now that’s for sure not my good side,” he murmurs, eyes locked firmly on the rocky ground.

“I still haven’t figured out which one that is,” he says.

That’s how they go, creeping down the mountain, calling out to each other every now and again, conversation punctuated by the snap of the camera. It makes the whole thing a little bit easier, makes his legs a little less sore and his breath a little less short.

It’s a distraction. That’s what it is when he’s delicately inching his way down a steep sandy slope and the ground starts to roll and his knees give out beneath him and he skids, slides, braces himself for a nasty fall. But the fall never comes because suddenly arms lock around him from behind and yank him tight against a body that’s bony, lean, rangy, and terrifyingly strong. 

“Can you stand?” the voice murmurs in his ear. 

Fusco can hear the chest rumble against his back. Obediently, he gets his feet back under him, tries to get steady. He lets his hands drift over the other guy’s, feels long fingers, fine bones.

“You OK?” he asks.

Fusco nods, trembling a little.

“Eyes front, Lionel,” he says, and suddenly Fusco’s standing alone in the middle of the trail, with nothing but the rustle of bushes to signify that anybody saved him at all.

“Thanks?” he calls out.

There’s no answer. There’s no answer the whole rest of the walk back, and no sound of the camera either. Fusco almost wonders if he’s been abandoned on the trail, except he keeps hearing just enough snapped twigs and shifted rocks to feel reassured that somebody’s following right behind him. The closest Fusco gets to a goodbye is a pebble chucked at him as he walks through Thunder Canyon. When he whips his head around, the person who threw it is long gone, but the camera sits pristine atop a rock, waiting for him.

“Thanks again,” Fusco calls out. “See you later?”

Still no answer.

He’s almost out of the canyon when he realizes he’s had his radio tuned to Radio Creep all day, that he hasn’t spoken to Harold or the others since this morning. He turns the dial frantically, ready to justify his disappearance, but he’s only been vaguely missed.

“You’ve been quiet today, Lionel,” Harold remarks, pleasantly, as Fusco drags himself up the stairs of the tower. 

“Yeah,” Fusco says, half-relieved, half-insulted that nobody panicked and called the rangers. “I went for a hike.”

Before he goes to bed, he leaves a little whiskey in a glass that he places at the top of the stairs. He leaves the windows open. Until late at night, he sits up in bed, nose buried in a bad novel he doesn’t quite read, sipping water and listening hard for the creak on the stair.

“Lot of hiking for you today,” he remarks out loud.

The voice comes hesitantly, sheepishly. “I felt guilty not saying goodbye.”

“I knew what you meant.”

“It was just...too close.”

“I understand. I mean, not really, but I get you want to be private. I get that.” 

“Thank you,” he says. “Do you mind if I keep the pictures from today?”

“Sure, man,” Fusco says. “You took ‘em.”

“Thank you,” he says again. “How’s the book?”

“I’m not really reading it,” Fusco admits. “I just needed something to look at. How are yours?”

He confesses, “I’ve already read them.”

He comes back most nights, after that. Fusco pours out the whiskey slowly, carefully, eking it out. In the interest of conservation, he stops pouring glasses for himself.


	6. DAY 49

Fusco has a plan when he opens his eyes in the morning and finds streaky, pink-gray dawn streaming in through the windows. It’s a mix of productive and leisurely that makes him feel comfortable, satisfied. He’s going to collect the glasses from last night, bring them in to the sink. He’s going to go downstairs and take a shower under the spigot to wake himself up. He’s going to try out the trail Harold told him about, stretch his legs, do some exploring. And he’s going to do the measurements Harold told him about, take stock of some facts and figures, so when it comes time to repair the trail, whoever’s job that is, they’ll know what kind of damage to expect. 

And then he’ll have the whole day to himself, whatever he wants to do with it.

He collects the glass from outside on the step. It’s been rinsed out already. The other guy does that a lot, when he visits. He’s a good guest, Fusco guesses, or he would be if he wasn’t so weird. Fusco just plucks it up, sets it on his desk.

He strips down idly, sleepily, his clothes still a little wet from the shower he took the night before. He used to be shyer about this. He’d wait until the bottom of the stairs to undress, do it furtively, nervously, one suspicious eye on the silhouette of Thoroughfare Tower. And again back when he thought he was being stalked by a murderer, scanning the treeline in a haze of paranoia, soaking his towel under the tap in his hurry to cover up.

Now…

Well.

Who could give a shit?

He slings his towel over his shoulder, takes his bucket - shampoo, soap, washcloth - and sets off down the stairs at a casual clip. Maybe too casual, too slow, too quiet, because he guesses he doesn’t make much noise and when he rounds the corner, there’s somebody standing at the spigot already.

He takes in a lot without meaning to. The way the muscles in his back bunch and twitch as he scrubs a cloth against the back of his neck, his wet salt-and-pepper hair, the sharp contrast of tanned arms and legs and back, white ass and thighs, the knots and whorls of scar tissue all up and down his skin. Fusco mutters, “Oh, fuck,” and turns away.

There’s a soft, answering “Oh, fuck”, the squeak of the spigot being turned off, and then deadly quiet.

“Too much?” he asks, sounding faintly embarrassed for the first time since Fusco met him.

Fusco feels blood creep into his cheeks, his ears, turn his chest brick red. “I mean, it makes sense. Where else are you gonna shower?”

“There’s a spring north of here,” he says, sheepishly, “with a waterfall and a pool and everything. Usually, I…” he hesitates. “It’s cold.”

“No, I get it,” Fusco says. “This is easier.”

He clears his throat. “You’re up early, Lionel.”

Fusco pretends the wooden steps he’s facing are real interesting, ignores the shape of a person shifting in the corner of his vision. “Yeah, I had some, uh. Some trail maintenance to do.”

“Oh. Good.” He coughs again. “Do you wanna...wanna cover up, Lionel?”

Wordlessly, Fusco pulls the towel from his shoulder and wraps it around his hips.

“Keep looking the way you’re looking,” he says. “Count to 100 and by then I’ll be gone.”

“You don’t have to…”

“To 100, Lionel.”

He groans. “One...two...three…this is stupid.”

“Keep counting, Lionel.”

Fusco sighs deep, picks up where he left off. As he counts, he hears the squeak of the spigot turning again, of water pattering harsh on gravel, softer on skin. He tries real hard not to think about that. While the other guy rinses himself off, he thinks about how casual this has become. It should be a bigger deal that the two of them are here now in broad daylight, just feet away from each other and so, so vulnerable. The water stops, replaced with the rustle of fabric. Drying himself off, probably.

“You already did the 50’s,” the voice interrupts.

“It’s early,” Fusco says, feeling color in his face again. “Give me a break.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “I can use the extra time.”

Fusco hears the jingle of his pack, carabiners rattling, further gentle rustling. Getting dressed?

“I didn’t mean stop,” he adds.

“What does it matter? Just tell me when you’re done.”

The answer is stubborn, inarguable silence. Fusco begins again at the 50’s.

Fusco only makes it to 76 before he gets interrupted again.

“Can I lean on you?” he asks.

Fusco pauses. “What?”

“While I put my shoes on. Can I put my hand on your shoulder?”

“Sure,” Fusco says after a moment. “Why the hell not?”

The second before the hand closes on his bare shoulder, Fusco resolves to learn all he can from it. First impression: cold and a little bit damp. But it would almost have to be; guy’s been bathing in the cold water from the spigot and him being here at all means the guy’s been hiking since early in the morning, if he ever left the tower at all. Second impression: big hands. Long and slim. Probably be a half-decent basketball player, maybe a half-decent pianist. But Fusco already knew that. Third impression: calluses. But again, there would have to be.

The pressure from him leaning is all downward force. Fusco knew the guy was taller than him; he didn’t know  _ how  _ much taller. The press of his nails is short, clean, well-maintained. In spite of the hand, he holds himself at a careful distance from Fusco.

He smells better than he did that day on the mountain. Cleaner.

“So,” Fusco says, “you have 24 seconds left.”

“Mhmm.”

“Feeling nervous?”

“What about, Lionel?”

“About getting away in time. Before I turn around and look at you.”

He chuckles, maybe a little sadly. “I don’t know what you think there is to see.”

Fusco moves as slow as he can, like you might with a scared animal. He lifts his hand, lets it rest over the other guy’s, heavy, reassuring, trapping. “You don’t have to do all this,” Fusco tells him. “I don’t care who you are or what you look like. I like you fine.”

He squeezes gently at Fusco’s shoulder. “It’s not about that, Lionel.” His hand drifts down Fusco’s arm, slow and lingering, before totally withdrawing.

“Well, what is it about?”

Guilty silence.

“‘Cause from where I’m standing, you broke into my house, I’m covering for you, I’ve been serving you drinks all summer, you come sit on my stoop every night and talk to me for hours, we go hiking together, you’re using my shower without asking me, we’re basically friends, and it’s a little fucking silly that you haven’t given me so much as a fake name. Won’t even let me see your face. And it’s not the biggest deal in the world - like it’s fucking weird but you’re not the worst friend I’ve ever had - but I don’t see how all this sneaking around and standing in shadows is better than us turning around, shaking hands, and going upstairs to have some coffee.”

More silence.

“Isn’t that better?” Fusco asks, exhausted. He turns around almost casually, hoping to find him there, hoping to catch a glimpse before the guy runs off or hisses and turns into a bat or whatever. No luck. It’s just the dripping spigot, the wet gravel, the long grasses rattling in the wind.

“For the record...” Fusco says into his radio a little while later. He’s in the cab of the tower, drying his hair with a towel. “...You’re kind of a dirtbag. But you’re still not the worst friend I ever had.”

No reply.

* * *

“I’ve been thinking about that guy lately,” he says, in a way that he hopes sounds casual.

“Oh?” Harold replies.

“The one who broke into my tower.”

“ _ Oh _ ,” Harold repeats. “You haven’t seen him again, have you?”

“No,” Fusco lies. “I was just thinking about...what kind of person lives out here. What makes somebody do that. If they’re OK, I guess.”

That part is true, at least. He’s here to pick up trail maintenance supplies from a lockbox, but got distracted by this old cabin, so gray and rotted that the door fell in when he tried to open it, revealing this incredible vista, a dead drop to a sea of pines, because sometime in the last ten or twenty years, the back of the cabin just fell off. He’s sitting there now, on the last steady boards, legs dangling into space. He’s thinking about whose place this was, whose cigarette boxes those are, who played that guitar in the corner, who slept in that old bed, what they were doing here in the first place. The wind howls around him. He wishes he could smoke the cigarettes.

“You almost sound worried for him,” Harold remarks.

“Maybe,” Fusco says. “Maybe a little.”

Harold sighs deeply. “Well, there’s definitely a personality type. Not all that different from the kind of people who become fire lookouts, if I’m honest. They’re introverted. Likely intelligent. They’re self-sufficient: in the sense that they’re competent and also in the sense that they don’t need to be surrounded by other people to feel safe or happy. They have some reason to leave society behind. At best, they’re cynical. At worst, they’re traumatized. And they’re at least a little bit paranoid.”

Sameen butts in: “Jesus, Harold, all you ever do is talk about yourself.”

“ _ Hush _ ,” Harold replies.

“The short answer is that there is no short answer,” Joss says over Sameen and Harold sniping at each other. “Mental illness can be a factor, but it doesn’t have to be. He could be arrogant, stupid, brave, shy...who knows, you know? Everybody’s got their reasons.”

“Guess so,” Fusco says, swinging his legs. He thinks about  _ his  _ guy, what his reasons would be. What pieces of that profile come together to make him, or somebody like him. Paranoid definitely, shy maybe, self-sufficient, but only in a way that makes him strong and tough and good at surviving. Not in a way that makes him not need other people. If that were true, he wouldn’t need to sit outside Fusco’s tower for hours every night, drinking and talking.

Fusco thinks about the way he comes back night after night. How he stores things in the tower, did that long before Fusco showed up. How he knows his angles, knows just where to hide on the staircase. How he’s already read all the books on the shelf. 

He asks his next question knowing full well that right now, his guy could be listening in: “Did the last lookout ever deal with anything like this?”

“The last lookout?” Harold asks.

“Yeah. Whoever was in Two Forks before me.” Fusco does his best to not sound like he’s driving at anything. “Were there break-ins, campsite raids, anything like that for that person?”

He says “person” too carefully, leaves that door wide open, because if they say she, if they talk about the 60-year-old woman or the 23-year-old grad student who held down the fort last summer, he’ll know his lead wasn’t worth it. If he’s going to piss off his guy by digging into things, he’d like to at least get something out of it. 

“Two Forks was unoccupied most of last summer…”

Root speaks up for the first time in a while: “What about John?”

Deadly quiet rules the radio waves. 

“No,” Harold says finally. “No, John was the year before last.”

“The guy from last year doesn’t count,” Sameen says. “What’s-his-face. Derringer or whatever.”

“Dillinger,” Joss says. “Like the outlaw.”

“Whatever. That guy punked out like two weeks into the summer.”

“He sustained a fairly serious injury,” Harold sniffs. “A shattered tibia is not ‘punking out’.”

Sameen snorts in a way that suggests this is quitter talk. “Guy was a douche anyway.”

Fusco tries to steer the conversation back on track. “So even if there was some weirdo in the woods, that guy wasn’t around long enough to notice anything?”

“Sure as shit didn’t notice the edge of that cliff.”

“ _ Sameen! _ ”

“What about the guy from the year before?” Fusco interrupts, heart thudding. “John?”

Quiet again, and then: “Harold?” Joss asks.

“Oh dear,” Harold says softly. “Wouldn’t I be better off asking you?”

“I felt like John opened up to you more,” she says.

Harold replies, very sadly, “I think he liked you best out of all of us.”

Fusco sits very still. A little bird, brown and white, lands on the edge of the house beside him. “Did something happen?”

Quiet again. Finally Root says, really carefully, “John had...problems.”

“He was a good man,” Harold says firmly.

Sameen: “Nobody’s saying he’s not…”

Joss breaks in, takes control: “He was a really nice guy. A little...quiet. And lonely. I think he thought he needed some time alone but really he needed...support. Other people in his life. Which he didn’t have, I guess.”

“John was ex-military,” Harold says. “He didn’t talk much about that. But I think it had a profound effect on him. He was...he struggled.”

His chest tightens as he watches the bird, preening on the very edge. “So...so what happened to him? Did he…?”

“ _ Oh _ ,” Harold says suddenly. “No, nothing like that. He left at the end of the season with everyone else.”

“It’s just, you were talking like…”

“We worried about him,” Sameen says, firmly. “While he was out here. He’d like disappear for a whole week and if you asked about it he’d say some really vague, really upsetting shit. He was a good dude but he shouldn’t have been out here by himself.”

Fusco isn’t allowed to say “That’s my fucking guy,” so he thinks it real loud. 

“Anyway,” Harold says, quick to smooth it over, “to answer your original question: John never reported any unusual encounters with other hikers.”

“Figures,” Fusco says. “Still, I thought it was worth asking.”

The little bird takes flight.

* * *

Fusco leaves the radio tuned to their frequency, sits up late with his eighth shitty political thriller in a row listening for a creak on the stair, but he doesn’t hear a thing until it’s pitch dark out. He’s leaning back with his eyes half-shut, book unfurled on his chest, when the radio lets out a puff of static.

“I thought you weren’t investigating me anymore.”

Fusco’s hand fumbles sleepily for the radio, jams it up under his ear. “You were listening, huh?” he asks, voice thick and tired.

“Did you forget that I listen?”

“No,” Fusco says, rolling over onto his stomach. “No, I figured you were. You pissed off?”

“I know that you’re curious but I don’t want anyone to know I’m out here.”

“I know, I know.” Fusco rubs at his eyes. “Nobody knows you’re out here. Nobody’s reported a campsite raid in weeks. If anybody asks, I’ll say you’re long gone.”

“I don’t want  _ you  _ to know where I am either.”

“Well, fucking relax. I still don’t.” He settles on the pillow. “I’m onto something though. Aren’t I?”

“Goodnight, Lionel.”

“Wait a minute. You coming up?”

There’s a heavy pause, evidence of somebody debating with himself over whether to say anything at all. “No,” he says finally. 

“OK.” 

“I need time…”

“It’s no big deal, buddy.”

“This morning was…”

“Yeah?”

An even heavier pause. Fusco really thinks he’s lost him this time, moves to turn off the lantern next to his bed when, softly: “How am I not the worst friend you’ve ever had?”

Fusco exhales, sits up in the dark. “I’ve lived a really shitty life, John.”

They sit quiet together for a little while.

“Tell you what,” Fusco says after a minute or two. “I’ll get you back somehow. I’ll beat you to that stream where you usually shower and ruin  _ your  _ morning. See how you like it.”

He’s hoping for a laugh. Or not even a laugh. John - if he is John - isn’t a laugher. He lets out rough, jagged little breaths. He speaks evenly in a way that tells you there’s a laugh locked behind his words.

Fusco doesn’t get any of that. 

But he stays up pretty late anyway, just to make sure.


	7. DAY 54

When Harold calls him up about the same old familiar thing - things stolen from the campsite, they say it’s a person, could be bears - his first thought is, “Getting sloppy again, John.”

His second thought is, “Fuck it, I could use the walk.”

He’s about halfway to the location when he hears jingling in the bushes and Bear trots out onto the path, tongue lolling, wet black nose snuffling at Fusco’s open palms. “Hey buddy,” he says, scratching Bear’s fuzzy jaw. “You wanna play detective with me?”

Bear wags his tail.

Before noon, and today’s already looking up. That’s what he thinks, anyway. 

The guy who called for him is kind of what he expected too. Big bushy beard, mud-caked hiking boots, dirty fingernails, a shotgun resting eerily across his knees. He’s like the guys the others talk about. He’s one bad week away from becoming like John and living out here for good.

Fusco stops right at the treeline, maintains a respectful distance from that guy and that guy’s gun. Bear seems to know what’s up, ‘cause he sticks right by Fusco instead of scouting the campsite.

“Good morning,” Fusco calls.

The guy stands. “About time you got here.”

Fusco figures that’s about as close as he’s gonna get to an invitation and steps forward, squinting in the morning light that fills the clearing. “Yeah, sorry. Got the call around 7 this morning.”

“Not a ranger,” the guy says, eyes flinty with suspicion, “are you?”

Fusco shakes his head. “I’m a fire lookout. I’m here to get the facts and make a report. Heard you had, uh, bear trouble?”

The guy snorts. “Wasn’t a bear. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

Fusco follows him through the campsite. This guy’s a serious nature boy, Fusco’s seeing. There’s a lean-to made out of ferns, an oven made of stacked rocks - shit this guy made in the last few days, just while being out here alone. He also spies the bow sticking out of the lean-to that he’s pretty sure you’d use to poach deer. He makes a note of that. Something for the rangers to deal with. For sure not him, ‘cause he’s not eager to tangle with the shotgun.

“This is really impressive,” Fusco says. He’s not sure if it warms the guy up, but he seems to agree that yeah, it’s really impressive.

Guy was storing his food in a bag up a fir tree, pretty much textbook stuff. More than textbook. 

“Bear shouldn’t have been able to get at that,” he says, and Fusco silently agrees with him. He brushes his thumb across the clean-cut end of the rope.

“Well,” Fusco says, eyes scanning the ground, “you’d be surprised at what I’ve seen bears get up to just this summer. Whole lot of stuff you wouldn’t expect. I won’t claim you were negligent with your food supply - you weren’t, that’s obvious - but there are some sharp bears in these woods, sir.”

Guy shakes his head. “I know what I saw.”

Fusco finds what he’s looking for: the clover treads are barely visible, just a toe print from somebody landing hard after climbing a tree. Casually, he lets his boot scuff the treadmarks away. “Saw something, pal?

“Not your pal,” the guy snarls and Fusco snaps to attention. “And I know exactly what I saw. Tall guy, 6 foot plus. Lean. Short hair, salt and pepper. Probably in his 40’s.”

Fusco blinks at him, faintly surprised. “Wow, you got a good look at him, huh?”

“Should’ve. I fuckin’ shot him.”

Fusco feels his mouth go dry. “...You…”

“Shot him. Heard him sneaking around out here, hit him with the flashlight, and fired.”

“...Is…” Deep breath. “Is he still around?”

“Nah,” the guy says, sounding disappointed. “Think I just grazed him. Got that tree pretty good, though.”

Fusco follows his pointing finger and spots a tree some distance away that’s half-exploded, bark blown back exposing soft, shattered wood. Fusco steps a little closer, panic rising in his chest.

“I was gonna track him,” the guy says as Fusco steps delicately through the undergrowth, trying not to disturb any evidence, “but I figured I should wait until the rangers get here.” He says it in accusatory tones, like Fusco let him down in a real personal way by not having a tin star and a funny hat. 

“To be honest, pal...” He sinks to his knees in the grasses, feels his world narrow to the dark shock of blood spattered on leaves, to the deafening thud of his heart. “...you’re goddamn lucky the rangers aren’t here. You  _ shot  _ somebody.”

He barely hears the guy rustle up behind him before he delivers a hard kick to Fusco’s upper back. He drops, rolls onto his back to find the mountain man’s shotgun in his face. “Not gonna make a big deal outta that, are you?”

Fusco takes a couple of real deep breaths until his head stops buzzing, until the world is a little bit clearer. He can hear Bear growling somewhere, a low threat. He props himself up on one elbow, pushes himself up into a sitting position. “Not my place to do that,” he answers the mountain man mildly. “I’m just a lookout. The rangers, on the other hand…”

Mountain Man doesn’t like how calm Fusco is, how he sat up like that, but he’s got visions of manslaughter charges dancing in his head and shooting Fusco’s gonna bring those charges straight up to murder. He retreats a step or two backwards, gun still trained on Fusco’s head. “He  _ stole  _ from me.”

Bear’s growls escalate to loud, threatening barks.

“Well,” says Fusco as he struggles to his feet over the guy’s protests of  _ Hey, fuck you, get down _ , “I guess I’m not familiar with the specifics of what you can and cannot shoot somebody for in Wyoming, but I do know you’re not supposed to be carrying weapons in a national park at all, and you’re sure as shit not supposed to discharge a gun out here unless it’s a life-or-death situation, and I guess this guy who was trying to run away from you doesn’t qualify.”

Guy’s threatened now, puffing up, trying to make himself the big man again. He steps forward, holds the gun right in Fusco’s face, a couple inches from his nose. “I was defending my territory,” he spits.

It’s then that Bear sinks his teeth into the guy’s calf.

That’s all Fusco’s been waiting for. He seizes the shotgun by the barrel with one hand, yanks him close, slugs the mountain man in the nose hard enough that he feels the bone crack under his fist. The guy staggers, sinks low enough that Fusco can brace his boot on the guy’s shoulder, leverage him to the ground as he pulls the gun away. He finishes the guy off with a sharp whack to the head with the butt of his own shotgun. “It’s not your territory,” Fusco pants, “it’s a national park.”

Fusco gets to work fast, Bear following at his heels with a kind of protective eagerness. He unzips his pack and shoves in the shotgun, runs back to camp to collect the bow from the lean-to and a knife that’s just sitting out by the campfire. He wants this guy to be fresh out of weapons when he wakes up. He crushes them into his pack, leaves the top open so it bristles with weaponry.

_ What now? _ Gotta get away safe, gotta radio in and tell Harold what happened, gotta…

His eyes fall on the shattered tree and he freezes. That happened to his body too, to John or whoever his friend in the dark is. He’s out there someplace, bleeding and hurt. He’ll need help. He won’t want it, probably, but he’ll need it.

Fusco crouches in the leaves, touches the blood still there. It’s fresher than he expects, just past tacky, still wet if you crush it between your fingers. Fusco holds his shivering hand out to Bear, lets his blood-smeared fingertips drift under Bear’s black nose. “Can you…?” His voice comes out weak, thin, cracking. He doesn’t know the Dutch for this. He shouldn’t be doing this alone. He should call Harold. He should really, really call Harold. “Can you find him, boy?”

Bear sniffs diligently at Fusco’s hand, tail wavering thoughtfully. He lifts his head, smells the air. His ears are sharp, alert.

All at once, he bolts into the trees.

“Shit.” Fusco sprints after Bear as best he can, leaving the unconscious mountain man behind him.

He hasn’t gone off-trail like this before, not ever. He knows enough to know that he knows nothing, he knows enough to be careful, but now there’s just the thudding of his heart, just fear filling him up. Branches whip at his face, underbrush scratches at his legs, he feels a cramp settle like a knife between his ribs. He doesn’t care if he gets lost, does not give one single shit if he runs into a coyote or falls down a ravine, he just needs to find John. Bear’s faster than he could ever run in his life, but he at least seems to understand that he’s working with a slower partner, ‘cause he pauses every so often, standing strong and alert at the very edge of what Fusco can see.

Someplace far behind him, there’s the crack of a gunshot, a distant cry of rage. The mountain man must be awake again. _ How many fucking guns does one guy need anyway? _ Fusco asks himself as he picks up the pace.

Bear leads him down a sharp ridge, where the earth opens up and turns craggy and gray, a tight little ravine that vanishes into a dark, deep point, burrowing into the earth. Bear barks at the entrance.

“Are you kidding me?” Fusco whispers, out of breath, hands on knees.

Bear barks again.

“I’m not even sure I can fit down there,” he says, squinting into the dark. But he can see it, the smear of blood on the rock, so what choice does he have? Fusco unzips his pack, scrambles for his flashlight. “If I get stuck,” he mutters, “it’s on you to save me you dumb dog. OK?”

He’s not sure if Bear agrees to rescue him if it all goes south, because he doesn’t really look at Bear at all. He’s shouldering his way between the rock walls, flashlight outstretched, pack in hand, gut sucked tight. If John’s in here, he has to.

Fusco inches like that for a while, rock pressed against his back and his chest, nose grazing the wall. He can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to run out of give, out of gut to suck in, to feel the rock refuse to yield around him. To not be able to push forward. To be too far gone to push back. 

This isn’t helping. He pauses, holds his breath for a long, long moment, and slowly lets it out.

When he pushes through and feels the walls widen and open up into a cavern, his knees get weak with relief. He crouches there a while in the last dregs of sunlight, breathing deep. 

“Bear?” he calls back through the crack in the wall.

Bear answers him with a bark. Fusco can still see him, snuffling with interest at the cave. He could fit, probably, if he tried. More than anything, Fusco doesn’t want him out there alone if the mountain man finds them.

He claps his hands. “Hier, buddy.”

Bear barks again, and then bounds away. Fusco can hear him for a little bit, him panting, the clatter of his nails. And then nothing.

“OK,” Fusco calls. “Good luck, I guess.” He sits there in the dark for a little bit, panting, waiting for the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach to recede. Then he shoulders his pack and shines the flashlight in a big arc around the cavern.

Maybe cavern is a strong word. More tunnel, only his perspective is shifted, having squeezed through such a thin space. Still, it’s high enough to stand in, wide enough that he could hold his arms outstretched and not even come close to touching the walls.

_ Alright, Lionel, you’re in, _ says a nasty voice inside of him.  _ Now how are you getting out? _

That’s getting ahead of himself. He has to find John first. 

The tunnel tilts gently into the earth, a slow and smooth incline that makes him lock up his limbs and creep along, tense as piano wire, ready to fall at any moment. He can feel the ceiling descending as he does, sinking and narrowing into a sharp point and he’s about to turn back,  call off the search and squeeze his way out the way he came in, when his flashlight passes over the floor at the tunnel’s narrowest point and reveals that it goes down. Reveals the scuff of blood on the edge of the hole.

Gingerly, Fusco drops onto his belly and crawls his way the last few feet up to the hole. “Please no bats,” he whispers, eyes shut tight. He turns the flashlight on the hole, opens his eyes again.

Good news: no bats.

Bad news: no John.

But he guesses good news outnumbers bad news because the hole is wide enough to fit his shoulders and gut easily, because it’s not that deep. It looks like a tall, broad man could’ve slid down feet first, guided himself down to the floor, and kept right on walking.

Maybe John’s not all that hurt, blood aside, if he can do that. Maybe Fusco’s just getting swept up in worry. Doesn’t matter. Even if he wasn’t hurt at all, Fusco would still want to track him.

Fusco backs out of the tight space and returns feet first, inching backward on his stomach, waiting for the drop. It comes, but it’s not so bad until he’s half through the hole, legs hanging into space, furiously regretting everything. He bets this was easier for John. John’s tall. He wriggles back a little bit more until his ass is braced against the wall, until the only thing holding him up is his arms and suddenly his own weight becomes a little too much and he drops.

He doesn’t hit his head. He doesn’t break anything either. He just lies there in shock, head and shoulders braced against his pack. He can’t make himself move right now so instead he listens to cave sounds, water dripping and a soft, howling sound like air being blown across the top of the bottle. It’s not exactly soothing. 

Fusco forces himself back onto his feet, shines the light up to the hole. He could get back up, he thinks, if he had to. It’d be hard. He doesn’t like his chances of doing that with a big, lanky guy on his back. John better be in one piece. He better not be hurt.

He turns the flashlight back on himself. A little bruised, a little battered, but still in one piece. There’s a dark smear on his shirt that sends a spike of panic through him before he realizes he’s not hurt, it’s not his blood. It’s John’s.

Fusco presses onward, feeling panicked and sick.

Almost immediately, he notices something is different. Something about the sound and the air, how the echoes are sharper and the breeze is colder. He kicks a small rock, hears the sound bounce out someplace far away on his left, like it was across an empty basketball court. Fusco swings his flashlight out to the left and illuminates a dead drop, a big fucking empty space. He is not in a tunnel, he’s on a catwalk high above a massive fucking cavern studded with stalagmites and stalactites, whatever the difference is, and honeycombed with tunnels. His flashlight shows the walls that water carved, the gradients of color in the rock from gray to brown to yellow to soft pink. An underground sunset. 

The Polaroid won’t do him any good here, he guesses. Fusco tries to take in everything he can.

A nasty thought occurs to him and Fusco creeps up to the edge of the ledge he’s standing on and lets his flashlight dance over the cavern floor below. It doesn’t illuminate much, not in any detail. It’s just too far away. He sees jagged rocks, he sees what he thinks might be a crushed beer can glinting in the low light. On a ledge about thirty feet below him, he sees a lone red Converse shoe, laces unfurled on the rock.

Not John. He doesn’t know much about John, but he knows what his shoes look like.

He brings his light up and sweeps it along the ledge he’s standing on, scouting the trail ahead. It wraps around the cavern walls, smooth and even, ending in another tunnel that burrows into the rock again. In the tunnel entrance, there’s a dark shape that he thinks is a rock at first. It’s so still and dark. But as he moves closer, as his flashlight scans casually over the huddled form, he sees a jacket, he sees shoes, he sees the shape shift gently, rising and falling with labored breaths.

“John?” he whispers.

The beam of a high-powered flashlight whips him in the face and he pauses, blinking and wincing in the light. “Jesus,” he mutters, covering his eyes. “What the hell was that for?”

The voice that answers is raspy, thick, weak. “What are you doing down here?”

“Looking for you,” Fusco answers, “if it is you.”

“You should turn around and go back to where you came from.”

“You’re hurt,” Fusco says, inching forward, shielding his eyes. “Plus I knocked out the guy that did it and he’s gonna be real pissed off when he comes to and finds out I stole all his shit.”

He answers with a wheezy, choked sound that Fusco eventually identifies as a laugh. That’s encouraging, he thinks.

“Can I come closer to you?” Fusco asks.

There’s an ominous click from somewhere beyond the blinding light. “Think you better go,” he says.

“Really? You’re gonna shoot me? Do you know how fucking claustrophobic I am? I came down here for one reason and one reason only: because I thought you might need help. Now either you do or you don’t - that’s the choice. If you do need help, I’m gonna do the best I can for you. If you don’t need help, you and I are gonna walk out of here together, because you’re my friend and sometimes I’m gonna want to look after you even when you don’t need me to. Now, do you need help or not?”

There’s a soft, shivering sigh and another, less ominous click. “Come closer, Lionel,” he says. The flashlight turns off and Fusco can see him.

He’s more fragile than Fusco imagined he’d be. Tall, yeah, Fusco guesses he is. He fills up the tunnel entrance with his long, slim legs. He’d thought lean when he saw him at the spigot, but there’s something of starvation to it too. His tanned skin is ashen with shock, shiny with sweat. There’s a deep, dark gash running freely just over his eye, giving his face a half-mask of gummed-up blood.

“Jesus,” Fusco whispers as he drops to his knees. “He didn’t shoot you in the head, did he?”

“No. He grazed my side. This is,” he pauses, hand over his temple. “I fell. After he shot me I fell, hit my head on a rock.” He looks almost embarrassed as he says it. “‘S not that bad, I just need a rest.”

“OK, but…” Fusco leans in, lets his hand graze over John’s, tries to guide it away so he can see the cut. “Think you might have a concussion, pal.”

He snorts. “Are you a doctor now, Lionel?”

“No.” He succeeds in pushing John’s hand aside, takes in the damage. “Although I at least would’ve put something on this to stop the bleeding, so compared to you, I got eight years at Johns Hopkins under my belt. When’s the last time you had something to drink?”

John exhales shakily. “Brought the whiskey, Lionel?”

He didn’t, although maybe that wouldn’t be the worst idea right now. It might smooth some of the mean out of John, to have a drink in him right now. He rummages in his pack, thrusts his canteen at John. “Drink something, asshole. You’re dehydrated.”

He takes the canteen obediently, takes a long, slow drink, eyes closed. 

Fusco digs deeper in his pack, finds the skeleton crew first aid kit he carries on his hikes - couple antiseptic wipes, couple band aids, couple big packs, some gauze, and two aspirin - and starts to fiddle open one of the antiseptic wipes. “Where’d he shoot you, John?”

He swallows hard. “My side. It just -” He groans when Fusco touches the antiseptic to the gash on his head and starts to blot at it. “‘S just a graze.”

Fusco’s heart sinks. He wants to throw down what he’s working on and look now but the head wound is bleeding constantly, freely, and he can’t let it go unchecked any longer. He cleans it out, packs it and secures it with gauze to stop up the bleeding.  _ There _ , he thinks, staring helplessly at John’s eyes, made shockingly blue by the blood-red of his face.  _ That’s something, at least. _

John’s jacket is shredded on his left side, a mass of feathers. Probably it took the brunt of the shot, Fusco hopes. He unzips John’s jacket, peels up his shirt. 

It’s not good. But it’s nowhere near as bad as he imagined. John’s side is pitted and bloodied with buckshot, and there are a few deep gashes torn along the flesh from where bigger pieces grazed him, but Fusco feels like his internal organs are probably in one piece. Not that he’s any kind of authority on the subject, but he knows that John is here now, John is awake, John is talking, John is bleeding a lot and has a nasty head wound, but if they get John to a doctor, he’ll be just fine. “OK,” Fusco says. “I think you’re right. Let me bandage that up.”

John shuts his eyes, wincing every time Fusco touches him. 

“So, what happened?” Fusco asks.

“Don’t you know?”

“I know the guy was a gun nut,” Fusco says, “and I know you fucked up. What happened? Why’d you pick that guy?”

John twitches, wriggles as Fusco fills his wounds up with gauze so Fusco has to lean on him a little, pin him in place. “Wanted a challenge,” he says through gritted teeth. “Somebody alert, somebody looking for a fight, somebody…” He dissolves into a shuddering groan. “Somebody I didn’t like,” he finishes.

“Sit up,” Fusco says. “I have to bandage you.”

John rolls with it, lets Fusco pull him upright, shrugs out of his jacket and rolls his shirt up higher unprompted.

“Where have you been the past few days?” Fusco asks as he wraps bandages around John’s middle. “Kinda missed you being a pain in my ass.”

“Just...keeping my head down,” he says softly. “I don’t like you looking into me, Lionel.”

“I know,” Fusco says. “Guess I’d have a whole lot more respect for your privacy if you didn’t introduce yourself by breaking into my house.”

John falls quiet.

Fusco clips the bandages in place, passes John the canteen again. “Drink up.”

He does, obediently.

Fusco sits back on his heels, rubs his bloody hands on the knees of his jeans. The world looks a little bit simpler now that John’s a known quantity: in pain, maybe a little concussed, but alive and probably out of danger. He can’t stay here. Fusco can’t haul him up through the hole in the rock or through that slim crevice. He needs a real doctor; Fusco’s bandages and high hopes aren’t going to be enough. “How are you feeling?” he asks.

John finishes his gulp of water. “Amazing.”

“Shut up. I need to think about how to get you out of here.”

“Not your concern.”

“Fuck off,” Fusco says. “I can’t take you out of here the way we came in; we need a team of people who know what they’re doing to carry you out of here.”

“No.” John’s eyes are round, fearful. “You can’t -”

“I can’t leave you down here.”

“There’s an easier way out! I was...” He trails off. “I just needed a rest. But it’s easier; it’s a lot easier. We can walk out of here.”

“John…”

“Please don’t.” He’s trying not to sound like he’s pleading.

Fusco leans in, takes one of John’s long, slim hands in his own. “I patched you up OK for now, but you need... _ need _ a real doctor or you’re gonna be in some trouble. You have a head injury, you could get infected; if anything that can go wrong with you goes wrong, there’s nothing I can do to take care of you. You get that?”

“I can take care of me,” John says softly, defiantly. The curl of his fingers around Fusco’s hand seems almost accidental.

“I don’t want you to have to do that.”

His throat is working, jaw tight. “If they find out I’m out here, they won’t let me come back. I have to...I have to go home. I can take care of myself.”

“I’m not gonna let you do that, John,” Fusco says, tightening his grip. “If you don’t want me to rat you out, I won’t, but I need to know you’ll be OK. So stick with me and I’ll look out for you.”

John shuts his eyes.

Fusco tells him: “I’m hiding out here too. I get it. I’ve got your back. Just let me get you out of here.

He nods, just once. He clutches hard at Fusco’s arm and he lets himself be lifted.

John’s heavier than Fusco thought he’d be. There’s this frailty to him, this shrunkenness, but what’s left of him is all muscle and bone, and it’s a bit slack and floppy at the moment. It takes a little bit of trial and error, finding a way to hold him up. Fusco slings John’s arm across his shoulders, lets John’s weight bear down on him, and it’s not too hard to move along, like that. The tunnel is smoother, wider than it was before. 

“So,” Fusco asks, shining his light on the path ahead, “where will this take us?”

“The cave system runs underneath this whole area,” John says. “I’ll go for the exit that’s closest to your tower.”

“Is that how you’ve been getting away with living like this?” Fusco asks. “Sneaking around underground?”

“I get away with living like this because I’m good at surviving,” he says. “Keep walking, Lionel.”

They make it a little bit further before John needs a break. He doesn’t ask for one but Fusco can feel the way he gets heavier, hear the raggedness of his breathing. He calls a break and lets John sit on a rock and pretend to not be grateful.

“Lionel?” he asks after a little while, between nearly inaudible gasps for breath.

“Yeah?” Fusco answers, not looking up from relacing his boots.

“You really a cop?”

It’s a funny question. Nobody’s ever had trouble believing that about him before. “Uh huh,” he replies. “I’m just not a very good one.”

He shrugs gently. “You’re not the worst cop I’ve ever met.”

Fusco smiles. He can’t quite help it. “Thanks, John.” And then, “Hey, am I right?”

“Hmm?”

“About your name. I don’t want to be calling you John all the time if I guessed wrong. It’s embarrassing.”

He’s met with stony silence.

“Well, if I am wrong,” Fusco says, “and you don’t want to tell me your actual name, do you mind if I keep calling you John?”

Maybe-John eyes him curiously from across the tunnel. 

“I just like having something to call you,” Fusco says. “Nicknames only go so far, you know?”

“I like your nicknames,” he says.

“That’s good.”

“But you can call me John, if you want to.”

Fusco nudges him gently with his knee, lets their legs brush together in the tunnel. “Alright. I will.”

He doesn’t know if John’s actually easier to move after that. It just feels as though he is. The tunnel starts to tilt upwards gradually, the ceiling starts to lift, the path starts to widen. There are signs of life: a carabiner here, a glow stick there, and finally another rusty gate with a broken lock. Back in Tourist Country, he thinks with some relief. The tunnel spills out into another, even larger one, and Fusco recognizes it instantly as the one they passed through on that day. They even walk past the exit that joins up with Thunder Canyon and the hints of sunlight, the whisper of breeze make Fusco’s heart pound.

His radio, after hours of silence, crackles back to life.

“...hours and hours since we last heard from him,” somebody’s saying, crackly and faint. “We’re losing daylight. I swear to God, Harold, if we don’t hear from Lionel in the next hour, I’m going out and…”

Joss. It’s Joss. Fusco’s weirdly touched. He almost drops John while he’s scrambling for the radio. “I’m here!” he practically shouts into the radio. The relief in his voice is a surprise. “This is Lionel, this is Two Forks. I’m here.”

“Where have you  _ been _ ?” Harold answers, audibly enraged. And also a little relieved, Fusco imagines.

“Where the hell are you?” Sameen asks. “You sound like you’re on the fucking moon.”

“I’m in a cave,” he answers, holding tighter to John. “I’m almost out. I’ll tell you the whole story then.”

He hears John’s breath catch and Fusco grips him tighter, hopes that’s reassuring. 

“A cave? What the fuck are you doing in a cave?”

They round a corner and far ahead of him there’s sunlight pouring out of the ceiling, cascading down a rockfall that looks easy enough for to climb. John pokes him in the ribs, jerks his head in that direction. “Hang on, here’s my exit. Give me a minute.”

He returns the radio to his belt, holds onto John with both hands. “Are you gonna be able to get up there?” he asks. “We can go out through the canyon if that’s easier. I don’t mind walking further.”

John just takes Lionel’s face in his hands, forces eye contact. “Lionel, don’t tell them. Please don’t tell them about me.”

“I won’t.”

“Please.”

“Trust me. Trust me even a little bit. I won’t.”

John grips him by the wrists, very tightly.

“Now," Fusco asks him, "can you do this, or not?”

Eyes downcast, he nods.

It’s slow-going. Step by step, ledge by ledge, they move together. John goes up first, easing his body up each stone in turn with a care and deliberation that seems totally new to him. He’d be up this in seconds, if he wasn’t hurt. Fusco travels behind him, hands on his back, on his shoulder, forming a cradle to stand in, steadying and bolstering at every turn. Pushing John up over the edge and into the light is such a relief it’s almost a high. Hoisting himself up through the exit and having John grab him by the arms and pull him the rest of the way up is something else, an indescribable warmth.

They can’t quite stand yet, so they lay there side-by-side on the sun-warmed rocks, catching their breath. John still clutches at Fusco’s arm, more out of habit than anything else. Fusco lifts his hips, unhooks the radio from his belt. “OK,” he pants. “I’m out. Ask your questions.”

“Are you hurt?” Joss asks. “That took a really long time.”

Fusco glances sidelong at John, with his half-lidded eyes and the bandage on his head going red. “No,” he answers. “Just tired. Listen, that guy I went to check in on earlier today is…”

“Did you  _ knock him out _ ?”

“Oh,” he says. “So, you heard about that part.”

They piece it together painfully over a series of cut-off sentences. The mountain man radioed in again around two hours after Fusco went into the cave, long after he woke up. If somebody made Fusco guess, he’d figure that the mountain man spent those hours looking for the guy he shot and the guy who knocked him out. Not to smooth things over and offer beers all around. When things didn’t work out, he said the guy they sent to help him after his campsite got robbed knocked him out, straight out of the blue. 

“Yeah, not quite,” Fusco says, still sprawled on the ground. His breathing is under control and he could probably start walking again if he had to but the sun is warm and John is resting his head on his shoulder and he doesn’t want to. “I tried to confiscate his gun ‘cause he shot somebody.”

John lifts his head and stares at him, visibly betrayed.

“He what? Who?”

“Whoever robbed his campsite, I guess. They were long gone by the time I got there, but he admitted to it and there was blood. I told him he needed to give up his gun and he tried to fight me, so I took it from him. And then I booked it.”

“So you went into the caves?” Joss says.

“Guy was coming after me and I was following the blood from whoever got shot.”

There’s hesitancy on the line, on John’s face. Harold asks, “Did you find them?”

“No.” Fusco sits up, rubs at the back of his neck. “There was a little bit of blood at the entrance and that was it. For all I know they just ducked in there to hide for a second. Anyway, I got lost as shit. You won’t catch me down there again.”

“I won’t check, but see that I don’t all the same,” says Harold. “You have the man’s shotgun?”

“Mhmm. His bow too.”

“If you would drop those off in a lockbox for the rangers, I’d be much obliged. They’ll be wanting it as evidence.”

“Sure thing.”

“Are you in need of medical attention at all?”

Fusco casts a nervous glance at John and he shakes his head.  _ Come on _ , Fusco mouths. John won’t be moved. “No,” he says. “I’m OK. I just want to get back to my lookout and sleep. Hey, Harold?”

“Yes?”

“Am I fired?

Harold snorts. “No. Sleep well, Lionel.”

“Will do.” Fusco clips the radio back on his belt. “Told you you could trust me.”

John scowls up at him. “You told them I was shot. That I use the caves.”

“I implied that you  _ might’ve  _ been shot and that you  _ might  _ use the caves. I didn’t tell them anything concrete; just enough to get that crazy asshole out of these woods and get them off our back. You’re still the invisible man.”

John’s scowl softens, just a little bit.

Fusco gets to his feet with a groan, stretches. “We gotta start moving. You need to rest.”

He sits up, winces. “I don’t need…”

Fusco catches him under the arms, hoists him up. “We’ll go slow,” he says. “The darker it is, the easier it’ll be to sneak you in.”

John lets himself be dragged to his feet, lets his arm be draped across Fusco’s shoulders.

“I’m looking out for you,” Fusco says as they stagger away from the hole in the earth. “I swear.”

“You’re giving me up piece by piece.”

“I - listen. For a guy who hides all the time, you are absolute dogshit at lying. So I’ll give you this one, as a freebie: the smartest lie you can tell is the one that’s  _ almost  _ true. People recognize the parts that they can see are real and take that as confirmation that the rest of it is too. Kinda smooths things over.”

“Lie often, do you, Lionel?”

“Yeah, I should; I’m a dirty cop.” They take their next few steps in sweaty, angry silence. “But I’ve been straight with you so far.”

“Or you’ve been straight with me about half the time, so I won’t notice when you lie to me. That’s how you operate.”

“ _ Jesus _ ,” Fusco sighs. “Are you pissy ‘cause of the concussion or are you always like this?”

John doesn’t answer.

The air grows colder, the sun dips lower, and by the time he spots the tower peering down at him over the crest of the last hill, the golden orange sunset has cooled to a dusty, bruised purple. Fusco - now dehydrated, battered, and more tired than he can ever remember being in his life - is about ready to push John back down the hill and call it a night. He almost says it out loud when John clutches him tight, almost convulsively.

“You OK, pal?” Fusco asks, softening his grip a little.

His only response is a pained nod.

Fusco gives him a little pulsing squeeze on the shoulder. “You’re almost there.”

At the foot of the tower, Bear waits, flopped across the lowest step. He lifts his head as Fusco approaches.

“Glad you made it back,” Fusco says as Bear leaps to his feet, tail in motion. “I still feel like you got the better deal.”

“Talking to the dog, Lionel?”

“He’s better company than you,” Fusco snorts. “Bear, this is John. He’s an asshole.” 

Bear trots right up to John, buries his nose in his outstretched hand, rubs his body against John’s legs, but doesn’t jump up. “We’ve met,” he says, fingers scratching over Bear’s back. His hand trembles. He’s breathing hard.

Fusco squints up at the winding stairs. “Can you make it?” he asks.

John hesitates, follows Fusco’s gaze with trepidation. “If we go slow,” he hedges. “Just give me time.”

Fusco nods, guides John’s free hand to the rail. “Hold on for a second.” While John obliges, Fusco shrugs his way out of his pack and sets it on the ground. “Let me take yours too.” John shrugs out of his more reluctantly, eyes on Fusco’s hands. It’s lighter than Fusco’s. Just the basics for a midnight raid, Fusco guesses. He places it on top of his pack, unopened. “I’ll go back for them once I get you upstairs. OK?”

John nods, appeased. He’s pliable, agreeable, horribly tired as he lets his arm tighten across Fusco’s shoulders once again. 

Fusco takes John’s free hand, the one on the railing, and brings that to his shoulders too. “Hang on, OK? Help me out here.”

John’s brow furrows. “Lionel, what are you…?”

And just like that, Fusco lifts him. It’s easier than he thought it would be. John’s tall and long but he’s bony, and the way his wiry body locks up in a rock-hard curl of indignation makes him easier to hold on to. 

“You don’t have to do this,” John snarls.

“I mean, nobody’s making me,” Fusco answers. He climbs carefully, at an angle to account for John’s long legs, very slowly to account for the dog who’s clattering along beside them, bounding up and down the stairs in an effort to scout ahead and behind while still keeping the pace. “But I figure you’ve had enough for one day. I won’t make it a big thing if you don’t.”

He can feel the rumble against his chest, a snarl bubbling up inside of John but never rising to the surface. He walks a little bit faster. It’s almost too easy, he thinks. He wonders if it’s one of those crazy adrenaline spike things, like when mothers lift cars off of their children or whatever. He feels too calm, though; too resigned. This is just another thing he has to do and he finds he doesn’t really mind doing it.

He tries to set John back on his feet while he opens the door, but a few minutes of being carried seems to reduce him to jelly, so Fusco props him up against the wall, pushes him upright as he fumbles with the doorknob.

Gently lowering John down onto the cot isn’t the best thing he’s ever done in his life - Fusco’s greatest hits are a scant, motley crew of assorted kindnesses and crisises of conscience and this doesn’t really register - but in the moment it sure feels like it. John cranes his head back, shuts his eyes, and Fusco realizes that his work isn’t even half done. 

The first aid kit in the tower is a hell of a lot better than the one he carries with him, which is a good thing, and John still has enough gas in the tank to sit up while Fusco unbandages his wounds. 

“I’m fine, Lionel,” he grunts as Fusco sluices down the wound on his side with pure alcohol. “Just let me sleep.”

“You can sleep when you’re dead, pal. Just let me get the fucking...cave grime out of you.”

John grumbles, grips white-knuckled at the wooden frame of the cot. 

Fusco cleans out the cuts as best he can, even plucks out some of the more obvious buckshot with tweezers, and re-dresses John’s various wounds. The bleeding’s slowed, and that cheers Fusco up a little. John stops bitching after Fusco doses him with the good pain meds, and that cheers Fusco up more. Finally, he has John settled on his back in the cot, quiet and a little bit silly from the meds. Fusco’s mopping the blood off of John’s face with a wet rag and he’s mostly thinking about how good it would be to sleep for a thousand years, when he’s startled to notice that John’s kind of a good-looking guy. 

Not that Fusco’s any kind of expert but like, objectively speaking. He’d been assuming the sharp cheekbones were a starvation thing, but now he’s kinda thinking they’re just that way. His jawline’s the same, sharp, defined. John’s looking up at him, soulful eyes, dark lashes.

“The fuck are you doing out here, buddy?” Fusco asks. He didn’t mean to say it out loud but it just pops out, soft and worn and wondering and a little bit sweet, like you might speak to a kid.

John watches him through sleepy, half-lidded eyes. He murmurs, “I was alone all the time.”

Fusco wipes his face again, catches a drop of bloody water before it rolls onto the pillow. “Uh huh?”

He’s quiet for a long time, trying to find the words in a brain that’s turning fuzzy and useless pretty fast as the pills start to really kick in. “It was easier,” he says finally, “to...this. You…?” He makes slightly desperate eye contact with Fusco, clutches at the front of his shirt.

Fusco closes his hand around John’s wrist, tries to detach him. “Yeah,” he answers. “Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense to me.”

It actually does.

John rolls the fabric of Fusco’s shirt between his fingers, feeling it out. “You’ve got...blood,” he says, finally.

Fusco looks down, sees the rusty brown smears all down his front. “Yeah, buddy,” he says as he lays John’s hand to rest on the cot. “That’s yours.”

“Oh,” John says. And then, unceremoniously, he slips into unconsciousness. 

For maybe fifteen minutes, Fusco stays right where he is on the floor, unable to move. There’s more to do, he knows, before he can go to sleep, but he can’t quite bully his legs into working right now. 

So, first thing, he just hauls the bloody shirt off over his head and throws it across the room. He couldn’t smell it before John brought it up but now he feels like he stinks of sweat and blood. Newly motivated, he repacks the first aid kit, crams all the various bandages inside and snaps the lid shut. He wobbles to his feet and puts it back in its rightful place on the bookshelf. After that, it doesn’t seem so impossible to go back downstairs.

At the foot of the tower, Fusco rinses himself off at the spigot, swatting at insects in the dark. He climbs back up again, dripping, two packs slung over his shoulder. He’s not sure if he feels better; he just might be in a place beyond tired, a place that’s just aching and cold certainty. 

He changes into boxers and is halfway through dragging a clean shirt over his head when he glances over at the cot and what he sees takes all the air out of him. ‘Cause there’s John, in the flesh - not a shadow, not a monster, not a mystery, just a hurt, sleepy guy with wet hair and sad eyes and a dog sleeping across his knees - and Fusco has no fucking clue what to do with him other than keep him safe, as best he can. 

There are extra blankets in here, he knows, and a sleeping bag he could lay out, but the process of finding them, of arranging them, sounds like some kind of bullshit, impossible thing. What he does is sit on the floor with his back braced against the cot, his head tipped back so it’s nestled against John’s side and he can hear the gentle, whistling in-and-out of his breath.

He sleeps like that.


	8. DAY 55

The bark of the radio wakes him up. It hasn’t done that in a while. He’s turning into one of those people who wakes up with the sun. Soon he won’t recognize himself, Fusco predicts grimly, eyes still shut tight. He reaches out blind, grappling until his fingers find the radio. “Mmmmh?” he groans, depressing the button by jamming it into his cheek.

“This is just a check-in, Lionel,” Harold says. “I saw your lights on last night; I just want to ensure that you made it home in one piece.”

Fusco tries to sit up, feels the crick in his stiff neck and almost screams into the radio. He swallows it up, opts to stay just as he is. “I’m a-OK. Just a little tired.”

“I’m not surprised. Stay in today, hm? Watch for fires. I believe that’s what we hired you for.”

Fusco dares to open his eyes a crack and is blinded by mid-morning sun. “Sure thing, boss.” He flinches when Bear snuffles at his ear, takes a swipe at his cheek with his humid, pink tongue. “Also, your dog is here.”

“Oh dear,” Harold says. “He’s not causing trouble, is he?”

“Nah.” Fusco reaches out to cradle Bear’s jaw in his hand, startles when his fingers graze John’s, already scritching at one of Bear’s cheeks. Bear doesn’t seem to mind, leans into both their hands. He swallows. “He’s a good boy.” 

“Don’t be afraid to send him on his way,” Harold says. “I also wanted to let you know that your attacker was apprehended this morning.”

Fusco lets out a weak cheer and is surprised when John delivers a gentle slap to his palm. A high five, he realizes about ten seconds too late. “I forgot to drop off the shotgun…”

“I can ask the rangers to meet you at your tower if you like.”

Fusco feels John’s body go tense behind his head, realizes rather belatedly that his head is resting against John’s stomach. “Nah, it’s OK, I’ll drop it at the lockbox near the canyon. Short walk will do me good."

“If you insist,” Harold says. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Conversation over. Fusco sets the radio down on the floor, leans back into John with a sigh. “You still alive back there?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Can I get you anything?” Fusco asks. “Coffee? More painkillers?”

“Water,” John mumbles. “And painkillers. Please.”

Fusco reaches for the ceiling, hears his battered joints crackle. “You got it.”

“And coffee,” John adds, sheepishly, as Fusco limps across the room. 

Fusco takes care of water and painkillers first, downs a glass and half a pill himself as the coffee percolates and John, tousled and tired but pretty much alive, sits upright on the cot. “You sleep OK?” Fusco asks.

John shrugs. “Yeah. About as OK as I could.”

He feels his face crease into a sharp grin. “Did I snore?”

John’s eyes crinkle as he nods. “But I knew you would.”

“You listen to me snore a lot, John?”

“Every so often,” he says. “It’s not exactly a hobby, I’m just...here at night a lot.” He adds, shyly, “I’ll watch for fires. While you’re dropping off the shotgun.”

He’s not sure how he’s supposed to feel, but he lands on a weird mix of unsettled and very warm. “Thanks, pal. That’s not for a couple of hours, though.”

“I could help,” John says. 

Fusco considers. “I look north, you look south?”

John agrees.

Nobody wants to stand and Fusco wants nothing to do with the floor after last night, so they settle on the cot: sitting upright, backs braced against backs, each with a coffee mug warming their hands. Together, they watch opposing horizons, looking for gray plumes of smoke, seeing nothing but clear skies, white clouds, birds wheeling overhead, the rolling of the trees in the wind.

Fusco allows himself to lean just a little bit more against John and wonders if this is how he was supposed to be doing this all along.


	9. DAY 57

When John finally gets the energy to stand, he uses it to cross the room and paw through the tiny bookshelf.

“Haven’t you read all of those yet?” Fusco asks, smearing sunscreen on the back of his neck.

“Three times each,” John says. “At least. I think. They’re all kind of the same so it’s hard to keep track.”

“You’d think you’d get sick of it,” Fusco says. He rubs the sunscreen behind his ears too.

“I am, but they’re the only books out here. Unless you brought something…?”

“I don’t know how you mistook me for somebody who reads for fun, but…” John fixes him with a soft-eyed stare and something in him flutters. “Go back to bed.”

John obliges. On the way back, he snatches up Fusco’s radio and adjusts the frequency. “To ours,” he explains, tossing it across the room to him. “So we can talk.”

Fusco catches the radio neatly, clips it onto his belt. “You chatty?”

John drops onto the cot a little heavier than he seems to mean to. “I’m bored,” he says.

After a couple days in the same cot in the same room with only Fusco to talk to, Fusco guesses he’d be climbing the walls too. “Don’t throw a party while I’m gone,” he says.

John doesn’t throw a party. John’s mostly quiet, Fusco finds. Fusco figures that’s fine. Saving that frequency for emergencies seems smart, probably. John needs his rest, even if he is bored. They don’t have to talk all the time.

All the same, Fusco has this compulsion to fill the air. He catches himself narrating his walk like it’s a fucking nature documentary, describing the colors of the air, the rocks, the plants. He stops a few times, holding the radio aloft and standing as still and as quiet as he can, trying to catch birdsong. 

He switches back over to Harold and the others when he gets to the supply drop. It’s not good to disappear for too long, he’s finding. It was fine before, but since the mountain man and his adventure in the cave, he thinks they might be worried about him. He checks in, trades a few barbs with Sameen, hoists the supply package with his name on it under his arm, and sets off back to the lookout.

“You still awake?” he asks as he twiddles the dial back into John’s frequency.

A long pause. “I’m awake, Lionel,” he answers, eventually.

“You want me to shut up?” Fusco asks. “Sorry, I...I dunno, I guess I wanted to keep you from being bored while you’re laid up, but now I feel like I probably just kept you awake, so…”

“You don’t have to keep me entertained, Lionel,” John says. “But I liked it.”

Fusco feels his ears go pink. “Oh.”

“If you want a break, I can take over while you walk home.”

Fusco isn’t sure what that means, so he says, “Sure.”

John starts to read. It’s one of the books on the shelf, Fusco knows. Either one of the ones he tried to read before, or else they’re all so samey that one sounds pretty much like another. It’s part paranoid political thriller, he guesses, and maybe part sci-fi, and there’s some grim, gritty hero and some science nerd who works with him and some sexy lady spy, or maybe there’s more than one. To be honest, he’s not really listening to the story, not anymore than John seems to be reading it. He’s listening to the rise and fall of John’s soft sand voice, to the way he uses it to read this shitty book the way a master pianist might use a piano to play Chopsticks, just for hell of it. Just to make the sound.

He takes his time in Thunder Canyon for the hell of it too, basks in the warm day and in the gentle voice speaking just to him. But he doesn’t waste more than a handful of minutes. John’s waiting for him after all. 

Fusco preps some of the new MREs from the supply drop for the pair of them. Not the nicest thing to serve a guest, but John doesn’t complain. Maybe because Fusco fills him up with painkillers again right after, so he’s sleepy and languid as he inches back against the wall and pats the empty space he made at the cot. “Let’s knock out another chapter before I pass out,” he says.

“Don’t think that cot can hold both of us for long, bud,” Fusco says from across the room, rinsing off the last dish.

“Could try,” John murmurs. His hands fiddle in the pages of the book.

And who is Fusco to say no? He dries off that last plate, his wet hands, and climbs onto the cot beside John. It creaks a little, whines as he resettles, but it doesn’t break. He braces his back on the wall, lets his leg linger against John’s side. He shuts his eyes, lets John’s sleep-thickened voice wash over him, tells himself he’ll only listen a little while, he’ll only stay until John drops off…

He wakes up in the gray hours of the morning with John’s head nestled into his shoulder, feeling cozy from shared body heat and faintly tricked.

He’s not angry.


	10. DAY 61

“We got MREs, MREs, and…”

“The suspense is killing me,” John says.

“It’s not like I got a lot of options.”

“You’re not a very adventurous trail cook, Lionel.”

“I’m not a very adventurous regular cook,  _ John _ .” He folds his arms, leans back against the counter. “You have a suggestion?”

“Fish,” John says. “You catch it, I’ll prepare it.”

“Do I look like I’ve been fishing before?”

John gives him the eye up and down for a long, thoughtful moment. 

“Well, I haven’t,” he says.

“Alright, city boy.” John lets his head rock back against the wall. “We’d better go together then.”

Fusco hesitates. “You sure you’re up for that?”

John makes pained eye contact with him and Fusco knows it doesn’t matter. He can’t stand to be in that cot any longer, under this roof any longer. He’s itching to get back in the woods. It had to happen at some point.

Fusco shrugs. “Suit yourself, nature boy. But I’m not carrying you back up those stairs. Once is enough.”

John sits up to put his boots on, cracks a shy smile when he thinks Fusco isn’t looking.

It’s not like it’s the first time John’s left the tower. The outhouse is outside, after all, and the spigot too. Fusco’s helped him up and down the stairs a bunch and he’s noticed that John doesn’t lean as heavy, that he walks a little faster. He’s been getting better all this time.

The knowledge of that makes him ache for reasons he doesn’t want to grasp.

The shirt John wore the day he came to the tower is shredded and bloody, so he leaves the tower wearing one of Fusco’s flannel shirts, too loose on him by half. That aches too, for a similar reason.

It’s a beautiful day. So beautiful it makes his eyes hurt. The sky is blue and unmarked as a sheet of glass. The sun turns the leaves and the boughs of the trees a deep, burnished gold. John breathes out, slow and perfectly happy. “It’s a good day to be back,” he says.

Fusco guesses it must be.

The walk out to Jonesy Lake is child’s play for Fusco at this point. It should be less than easy for John, something so automatic you don’t think about it anymore. It’s odd to see him struggle with it, pick his way over the rocks with care. 

It’s odd to see him at all, if it comes to that. Fusco keeps forgetting to look at him as they walk together. He feels like he should be looking away to protect John’s privacy.

John sits down hard on the pebbly beach at Jonesy Lake, spreads his long legs out on the rocks with a barely perceptible sigh of relief. He lets his eyes flutter shut as he soaks in the sunlight. “OK,” he says. “Get me a fish, Lionel.”

Fusco sets his pack down heavy on the beach next to John, who immediately steals it for a pillow. “Don’t suppose you have any fishing gear stashed out here?”

The dark fringe of John’s eyelashes is undisturbed. “No, Lionel. No, I don’t.”

“So how am I catching you a fish today?”

He raises one eyebrow. “You’ve got hands, don’t you?”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m serious,” he says. “I do it all the time.”

Something about the set of John’s mouth tells Fusco that he  _ does  _ do it all the time, because that’s the sort of thing a person like John does, but he knows it’s a ridiculous thing to ask. Knows it straight down to his bones.

“Better get to work, Lionel. You’re losing daylight.”

Fusco sits down on the beach with a snarl and starts unlacing his boots.

Right away, he sees it’s not impossible. Wading in the water with his jeans rolled up to his knees, Fusco finds he can see the shadows of big fish gliding under the blue-silver surface, stirring up the muddy bottom and hiding themselves amongst reeds. They’re just out of the shallows.

Fusco wades in further, gets his jeans wet.

The further he goes in, the softer and slicker the bottom of the lake becomes, sucking gently at the soles of his feet with each step. He can’t sneak up on the fish, not exactly, but he can kinda...sidle up to ‘em. Let his legs become a part of the underwater geography until the berth they give him isn’t quite so wide. 

“ _ Today _ , Lionel,” John calls from the shore, and Fusco can’t snap back at him for fear of disturbing the fish.

He stands very still, very quiet, with the water almost up to his hips, until a fat bass wanders lazily into his reach. He waits still longer for it to come close enough to brush its fanlike tail against his calf before he lunges.

The thing about fish is, even if you already know perfectly well in your head, in like a basic academic kind of way, that fish are slippery, you’re not really prepared for how slippery until it’s wriggling out of your grasp. He changes direction, lunges for a second fish that drifted too close. His hand never so much as grazes it as he slips off-balance into the shallows with a loud splash.

He sits up, coughing and spluttering, and by the time Fusco gets the mud out of his eyes, John is standing on the shore, a picture of serene amusement.

“I hope you’re happy,” Fusco calls.

“I don’t know if happy’s the right word,” John replies. “But it’s pretty funny, Lionel.” He beckons Fusco in. “Get out here and dry off. I want to see if I’ve still got it.”

Fusco gets to his feet with some difficulty. His clothes weigh 100 pounds and his pockets gush water. “Be my guest.”

John graciously strides into the water, head held high. The only sign he gives that he is, in fact, a son of a bitch is the smirk he gives Fusco as their shoulders brush when they pass each other. 

He wades in deeper than Fusco did - but then, his legs are longer - and waits for more time than Fusco did, eyes shut and perfectly still with his palms flat on the water’s surface. Suddenly, so fast Fusco almost can’t see him moving, he darts under the water and emerges with a silvery fish wriggling in his hand. “See?”

“How is that any different from what I was doing?” Fusco asks, wringing out his shirt on the beach. 

“Simple,” says John, casually throwing the fish onto the beach to flop frantically at Fusco’s feet. “I caught a fish and you didn’t.”

He catches two more like that over the next hour or so. In between catches, he dispatches them, kills them quick and - according to John - painless. “I’ll show you how to butcher them back at the lookout,” John says as they pack the fish in ice. “Since you’re not much of a fisherman.”

Fusco flips a handful of lake water directly into his face. John tackles him bodily into the lake. Not his brightest move.

Late in the afternoon, they stand side by side in the water, soaked and mud-streaked, watching the fish swim about their ankles. John will occasionally strike, bring a flapping fish up in his hand, and then casually let it go.

“You’re just showing off now,” Fusco says.

John admits, “Maybe a little.”

“How’d you learn to do that?” Fusco asks.

“My father taught me to fish the normal way,” John begins, “when I was young. And then…”

“Survival training?” Fusco asks.

“I was an Army Ranger,” he admits. “I did...other things. Sometimes I’d be in the middle of nowhere for a while. Sometimes I get tired of MREs.”

“Fair enough.”

They haul their bounty back up to the lookout. Fusco keeps a close eye on John and finds the stiffness he saw in John’s walk earlier in the afternoon has loosened up into an easy, confident stride. He can walk. He can catch fish. He won’t want to rely on Fusco for much longer.

They clean themselves off at the spigot before they go upstairs and Fusco hangs their sopping clothes on the line while John drags the cooler of fish upstairs. He walks Fusco through boning the fish, points out the best cuts, uses a knife with an ease and a swiftness that makes the hairs on the back of Fusco’s neck rise.

John works magic with the dented frying pan, the last of the olive oil, and some ancient spices Fusco found in the back of a cupboard. They eat outside, legs dangling from the top of the tower. John is confident. He’s able. He doesn’t need to stay here anymore.

He spends the night.


	11. DAY 63

Fusco spots his first fire. 

It looks like nothing at first, a small, odd cloud on the horizon, darker than it should be. He calls it in anyway, just to be safe.

By nightfall, it’s a second sunset, smoldering in a warm orange halo over the trees.

“Based on wind patterns, I don’t imagine you’ll have anything to worry about,” Harold says over the radio. “Still, well-spotted, Lionel.”

“Don’t feel like I did all that much,” he replies, leaning on the rail of the tower, “but thanks, Harold.”

“It may not feel that way, but advance warning means park services can evacuate people and start working on a plan almost immediately.” Harold sighs. “We’re out here for a reason, Lionel. Take the compliment.”

“Will do. Anything else?”

“Not much you can do. Stay out of its way and, ah, enjoy the show. They’re quite beautiful, wildfires. In a destructive kind of way.”

_ It really is _ , Fusco thinks, just as John’s hand settles on his lower back.

“How do you feel about all of this?” Fusco asks as he clips the radio back onto his belt. “The fire, I mean. Do you feel like your house is burning down?”

John shakes his head. “This is just what happens. It’s not all bad, you know. When you burn up the old, new life has room to grow in its place. Houses don’t grow back. Forests do.”

Fusco leans into John’s side, watches the firelight play off the clouds. “That’s a nice way to think about it. Maybe that’s what I need.”

“Hmm?”

“Burn it up. Start over.” He stares into the flames. “Can I tell you why I’m out here? Really? Not to get mushy, but I think you’re the only person I can tell.”

“Starting to trust me, Lionel?”

“Something like that.” He chuckles nervously. “It’s more that you’re the only person out here who I’m sure won’t report me.”

“You’re not giving them enough credit,” John says, gesturing to the radio. 

“You don’t know what I did yet.” His hands are twisting on the rail. “I killed people, John. A lot of people.”

The railing groans a little as John settles next to him, leans into him. “They deserve it?”

Fusco thinks real hard. “No. I was gonna say some of ‘em maybe - like some of ‘em were dealers and some of ‘em were cop killers and some of ‘em were worse even than that - but even then, it wasn’t my place.”

John exhales, thoughtfully. “Why did you do it?”

It’s a big question, not because it’s complicated or because Fusco doesn’t know the answer, but because the answer is nastily similar. “I trusted the wrong guy. I thought he was looking out for me and maybe he was, in his way. But he brought me into it. And I would’ve had to stand up to him to get out.” He peels a short strip of wood away from the rail. “I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t brave enough. So I went along with it until I couldn’t stand myself anymore. And then I ran.”

A soft rumble in John’s chest. “You’re afraid of him?” John asks.

Fusco nods. What he says, almost unbidden, is, “I loved him.” He recoils from it. The words seem to float there in the heady dark, a condemnation.

“That can be worse,” John concedes.

“It’s a problem I have,” Fusco says, twisting the splinter of wood between his fingers. “I get attached to scary people and I let ‘em walk all over me.” He lets his boot bump against John’s, gently accusatory.

John nudges him, nudges him again, keeps tugging at Fusco’s sleeve until he finally gives in and looks up at him. John’s eyes are soft, dark, illuminated by the distant firelight. “You stand up to me all the time,” he says.

“You kidding?” His heart thuds, jagged, rabbitlike. He doesn’t know why. John’s rough hand cradles warm against his jaw. He’s not sure why that is either. “I let you walk all over m…”

John has chapped lips. He hasn’t shaved in a few days and his stubble is prickling, halfway to beard. Fusco can feel his chest and stomach through his shirt, feel the muscles tight and trembling from effort, but he’s holding Fusco real delicate, like he’s prepared at any moment to let him go. Fusco’s grabbing him hard, fingers digging into John’s biceps, snagging in his shirt so he can’t back out. Fusco doesn’t remember doing that, but he also doesn’t regret it.

A few things slide into place for Fusco, stuff he’d been pretending not to notice.

John breaks the kiss, but only barely. They stay nose to nose, brow to brow, breath to breath. “Sorry,” John says. “Maybe that wasn’t the moment.”

“It’s a little weird,” Fusco admits. He doesn’t expect to sound so out-of-breath. “I woulda thought the lake…”

“Oh.” John’s sigh trembles. “That would’ve been nice. I just didn’t…”

“Me neither.” So they’re both at fault.

“I can wait,” John says, “for a better time if you w…”

Fusco quiets him, drags him close. 

They’re a shy, needy tangle as they stagger inside, blind and distracted and inseparable, opening doors and taking steps and tugging at clothes by turns.

“I knew somehow,” John whispers as he presses Fusco back onto the cot, as he struggles with the last button on Fusco’s shirt. “I knew from the moment I saw you that we were here for the exact same reason.”

Fusco seizes him by the shirt collar, drags him down.


	12. DAY 66

He wakes in the middle of the afternoon, pushed out of a light, warm drowse by some internal clock. He’s naked. John’s pressed up against his back, drunk on skin-to-skin contact. They’re napping in a puddle of blankets and sleeping bags on the floor because the cot can’t handle what they’re doing anymore. He gets up, finds his binoculars, and scans the treeline for signs of smoke.

“You’re starting to take to this,” John says, sleepily.

“I think I’m just paranoid ‘cause I haven’t looked outside in an hour.” He nudges John with his foot. “Wonder whose fault that is.”

“Take some responsibility, Lionel.” He feels John’s hand close around his ankle. “Get back down here.”

“Hang on, gotta make sure the northwest isn’t on fire.”

John pretends to be patient for another few minutes before Fusco’s satisfied and settles down beside him again. The floor’s still a little hard on his back but the blankets are warm and John radiates contentment at him from the pillow next to his head.

“Hey,” Fusco says softly, ruffling John’s hair a little.

“Hey.” John inches a little closer to him, intertwines their legs beneath the blankets. “Are you gonna keep doing this?”

“Being a lookout, you mean?”

John nuzzles his head deeper into the pillow with nodding.

Fusco exhales. “I don’t know. Kinda depends on what happens next year and where I...where I go from here.”

“What do you think you’ll do after the season ends?”

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” Fusco says. “I gotta go back to New York. I knew that’s what I had to do, it’s just...hard. That’s where my life is, where my kid is, where my…” He adjusts the pillow so it cushions his shoulder. “...Where my problems are. I gotta go back and take care of all that or I’m gonna regret it for the rest of my life.”

“But next summer…” John prompts.

“Cops don’t get summer vacations,” he says. “I took unpaid leave to get out here. I dunno if I’m gonna be able to take time off work to come back next year.” Fusco sees the flicker of sadness that passes across John’s face, notes it down. “Of course, by this time next year, I might not have a job. Depending on how things go, I might have to live out here with you in a cave or wherever.”

“Would that be so bad?” John asks.

A very tense, careful pause.  _ Would  _ it be so bad? Probably. He’s seen how thin John is, how he steals to survive. Fusco’s thought there might be more to that, that it may be that John intentionally eats less food than he needs, that he steals just for the risk of it, but what if he  _ doesn’t _ ? Fusco’s out here in the warm months, the days of lush plenty, but he doesn’t know winter in the mountains. He doesn’t know what makes someone capable of that.

If he said it out loud, John would point out that Fusco never thought he could cut it as a lookout, never thought he would make the hike out to the tower, never thought he could hike Beartooth Point, never thought he could identify safe plants or catch a fish. What other things is he capable of that he doesn’t think he can do?

And he wouldn’t be alone out here. He’d be with John. What hasn’t John taught him yet? What haven’t they seen and done together? What would he be leaving behind in this strange, scary man?

Fusco says what he’s certain of: “My kid,” he says out loud. “I could leave all the rest of it behind if I had to, but I’d have to go back to him.”

John nods, solemnly. “I can understand that.”

Fusco leans closer to him. “You have kids, John?”

“No,” he answers, so quiet Fusco almost can’t hear.

They lie like that for a while, legs tangled, heads resting together, no sound but their own breathing.

After a while, Fusco says: “You’re gonna hate this.”

“I am?” John asks, mildly. His eyes are closed. His lashes are long.

“I think so.” Fusco takes a deep breath. “But what if you came with me?”

John goes very, very still.

“I’m not even saying forever,” Fusco says, a little too fast. “I’m just saying that...maybe you could come back with me. See the city. Meet my kid. Try not foraging for a while. You ever been to New York?”

“Yes, Lionel,” he says, careful and tense. “I’ve been to New York.”

“Listen.” He finds John’s cold-fish hand under the blankets, grips it tight. “I know it’s not as easy as what I’m saying. I know we haven’t known each other for very long. I know you came out here for a reason, like a  _ real  _ reason, even if you won’t tell me what that is exactly. And I know you love it out here, because it’s beautiful and I love it too.”

Beside him, John’s breath catches.

“But, pal, you are stealing to stay alive. Like barely alive. And you’re alone all the time and I...I’m not gonna pretend I know what that means for you. I know somebody must have done something awful to make you come out here like this. Maybe a bunch of somebodies. But I also feel like you’re the kind of person who isn’t gonna be happy unless he’s close to other people.”

John shifts and Fusco turns to look at him, to meet his tired, wet eyes.

“I’m not saying it has to be me,” Fusco says. “I’m not that full of myself. I just think it should be somebody.” 

“And you’d know a lot about that,” John says, “about what that looks like…”

“That looks like me,” Fusco says firmly. “I’m one of those people. If I’m alone at a bar I make friends out of whoever’s closest ‘cause I can’t stand it otherwise.” He squeezes John’s hand a little tighter under the covers. “I was so fuckin’ sad out here until you came along.”

John tugs at his hand, pulls him really close. John’s free hand falls on Fusco’s upper thigh.

“Not to kill the mood,” Fusco says as John purposefully guides Fusco’s legs around his middle, “but think about it, OK? Even if it’s just thinking.”

As his mouth presses down on Fusco’s, he murmurs, “I will think about it.”

After that, they don’t talk for a while.


	13. DAY 70

There’s a power line down on the ridge, Harold says. Could Fusco go have a look, maybe fix it if he can?

Of course he could.

Fusco asks John if he wants to walk with him, to stretch his legs and keep him company. It’s a long hike, but not a hard one. John turns him down. That should have been his first clue, but John’s been quieter these past few days, and he’s been sleeping longer. But it’s real sleep, Fusco reassures himself, not unconsciousness. When John slept before, it was in tiny, humming doses, easily disrupted. Maybe he’s learning to relax.

Fusco hikes out alone.

There’s a cooler snap to the air, a freshness Fusco can’t help but like. It’s so different from anything at home, so wild, so open. When he feels the wind on his face like that, it’s hard to miss the cramped, humid, stifling summers back in New York. He does anyway, but in a grim and wistful way, the way you diligently root for your home team even when they have a really shitty season.

“What’s it like out here,” he asks John over the radio, “in winter?”

There’s a long, empty moment. Fusco remembers now that John was sitting on the cot when he left, that he might be deep asleep by now, and he’s about to put the radio away and pretend it never happened when John replies, voice flat and crackly: “Cold.”

Fusco feels his dumb, traitor mouth curl up in a smile. “Thanks. I wouldna figured that out on my own.”

“Don’t mention it, Lionel.” A soft pause and then, “You wouldn’t believe the snow.”

“I mean, I’ve seen some snow. Blizzard of ‘78? Fuckin’ forget about it.”

“No snow plows out here, Lionel,” John says.

Fusco pictures the drifts that towered over his head. “Yeah. Shit.” He clambers up a steep, rocky incline and imagines it slick with ice. “What do you do?”

“Lie low,” John says. “I save food for the winter. Canned, preserved, pickled...whatever. I ice-fish, hunt if I have to. I stay quiet, sleep, conserve energy. Stay warm. Stay away from risk. Just try to stay alive until spring.”

“Sounds...really hard.”

“It is.” His voice is halting, hesitant. “Lionel, it’s so beautiful.”

Fusco looks around him, the bright blue sky, the topography of ridges and peaks. There’s no way it couldn’t be beautiful.

“It’s so bright,” John says, as if reading his mind. “The sunrise over the mountains turns the snow pink and blue and it  _ glows _ . Fresh snow in Thunder Canyon on the red rocks, it...you couldn’t imagine it.”

Fusco tries.

“I’d like for you to see it someday,” John says, voice trembling just a little.

Fusco swallows hard. “I’d like that too,” he says. “Maybe someday…”

“It’s far and difficult to travel for ‘maybe’,” John points out.

“Maybe so, but it was far and difficult when I came out here in the first place, so, you know. Don’t count me out.” He coughs. “Take it you did some thinking.”

“I did,” John says. “And you were right, I did hate your idea.”

Fusco laughs miserably. “Do I know you, or what?”

“But I do want to stay with you. Whatever way I can. Isn’t that strange?”

Fusco nods, remembers John can’t see him, says croakily into the radio: “Yeah, that’s pretty weird. Me too, though.”

“I never wished I was back in the world before,” John says. “I guess I still don’t. But I think you’re right about me needing people. And I think you’re wrong when you say you don’t have to be one of them.”

He’s standing perfectly still in the middle of the trail. He doesn’t remember deciding to stop. He must have simply forgotten to move, somewhere along the line. “OK.” He’s totally breathless. “OK. How do you want to do this? Do you need to make a trip back to your place? Get like ID and personal stuff? How…?”

“Lionel.” John says his name very sternly, but still in that gentle, careful way he does, like he loves every syllable. “I’m letting you know that I want to come with you. I really do. It isn’t your fault.”

Fusco’s chest tightens. Air comes slow and thick. “John?”

“I can’t go out there again. I can’t be around people again. Not after what I did.”

“What  _ you  _ did? You know who you’re talking to, right? If you don’t belong in society because of whatever you got up to, where do I belong? A fucking zoo?”

“You knew,” John says. “When you became too terrible, you saw it happening. You knew enough to run out here.”

“Didn’t you?”

John remains quiet for a few long, dangerous seconds. “I ended up here. You don’t know what I’ve done, Lionel.”

“I’d like to know.” Panic creeps into his voice and he tries to push it down, tries to hide it. “If you wanted to tell me, I’d listen. And I’m in no place to judge.”

A small laugh, very sad. “I’m really going to miss you, Lionel.”

And now Fusco can hear what he’d been telling himself he couldn’t: birdsong. Wind. The crunching of leaves and rocks underfoot. Not here, on the path where he’s standing miserably, white-knuckling and staring at the trail ahead because he’s not sure where else to look. From the radio. From where John is.

John is outside.

“Please don’t.” Fusco’s voice is so thin, so drained.

“Goodbye, Lionel.”

“Will I see you again?” he pleads, ragged and frantic. “I can’t make you come back with me, but I’m still out here a few more weeks. Can’t we stick together until then?”

No answer.

Fusco’s willing to wait a while. He knows John can be prone to long silences and dramatic pauses, that he won’t answer right away every time, that he might be thinking hard before he speaks.

But he doesn’t speak. 

Fusco finds the energy to keep walking, after a time. He has an idea like it might be the brave thing or the noble thing to run back to the tower, to meet up with John on the road (somehow) and tackle him to the ground (again, somehow) and hold him tight until he saw sense. But it’s a long way back to the tower from here and Fusco’s afraid of what he’ll find there. So he keeps on walking.

He hikes out to the ridge.

He repairs the wiring - an easy job - and tells Harold he repaired the wiring and his voice neither shakes nor buckles while he does it.

He hikes back to the tower. He does it slowly, like it’s his first hike all over again, but the tiredness isn’t in his body. It’s just him: his brain, his heart.

He climbs the lookout tower like it’s a hangman’s scaffold.

His little room isn’t as lonely as he imagined it would be, with John gone. Although he guesses that might be impossible, because he imagined a black hole, a twisting vortex of desolation, and this is just a room without a person in it. John left everything in its place, except his own stuff that he brought with him that day. Only that came to feel like it had a place here too and now the room has little pockets of emptiness where his backpack leaned against the wall, where his jacket hung.

Fusco places his own pack, his own jacket in the empty spaces, just to fill them for now. He folds up their makeshift bed on the floor; he’s only one person now and can move back to the cot. He eats dinner in silence, which they did pretty often anyway, but it’s indescribably worse somehow.

The only thing missing is the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle with its last little amber remnants whispering around at the bottom. Fusco doesn’t miss it, exactly. It was never really his and it was probably stolen besides. It’s just that he’s furious, because John thought he had to take the whiskey with him, to stop Fusco getting drunk. It’s just that he’s powerless, because it was the first thing that made John speak to him and now he doesn’t even have that anymore.

Until the sun sets, he watches the horizon for flames. There’s no one to watch northwest while he watches southeast.

He rotates, every so often.


	14. DAY 79

He knows something’s wrong before he’s even awake. It’s too dark and too bright all at once, and the voice on the radio that wakes him sounds too ragged. “Wake up!” it’s shouting to him. “Wake up!”

It’s Harold. He’s never heard Harold shout like that. He reaches out for the radio in the orange semi-dark of the tower. “‘M up,” he says, voice thick and groggy, and he hears others chiming in, overlapping and chorusing. Everybody’s up. Everybody’s confused.

“Harold,” Sameen moans, “what the fuck?”

Harold cuts her off, all business. “Each of you, sound off when I give your lookout name. I need to know you’re all awake and listening.” 

Fusco lurches upright on the cot, his heart thudding. The world outside his windows glows. He thinks he knows already. He sounds off when Harold says “Two Forks.” They all sound off, one by one, clipped and clear, as Harold calls their tower names. They’re all quiet, all listening. Fusco swings his legs out of bed, starts getting dressed.

“This is the big one,” Harold says. “You’ve all been relieved of duty. Pack whatever you can’t stand to leave behind and hike immediately to Thoroughfare. The forest service is sending in rescue helicopters and we’ll all be lifted out. I’ll remain here as long as I can to be sure you all make it out safely. Questions?”

“Bear?” Root asks, audibly hurried.

“He’s here with me,” Harold says.

Fusco imagines they all breathe a small sigh of relief.

“We need to do anything here before we get out of dodge?” Sameen asks.

“Usual end-of-season procedures do not apply. Pack up and go. Shut off the generator on your way out the door if you remember.”

“How did the blaze start?” Joss asks.

“I’ll have more information about that later.”

Fusco finishes tying his hiking boots and asks, “How long do we have?”

Harold hesitates. “We can’t know that. Not with any confidence. I know you’re not the fastest hiker, but I urge you to make your way to Thoroughfare...first of all, carefully, but second of all, quickly. Just do the best you can. None of you are in immediate danger, provided you start walking soon.”

“On my way,” Root calls.

“Good.” Harold exhales, slow and shivering. “Let me know when you leave your towers. Remain on this frequency. I’ll check in occasionally. As of right now, this is an emergency-only channel.”

Fusco is pulling Polaroids from the wall, still backed with tape or stuck through with pins. He never had much in the way of clothes to begin with, his gun was the first thing he stowed in his pack, and his hiking gear was already in there, waiting for him. He didn’t bring anything out here worth a damn. The pictures he took - the mountains, the rivers, the sunsets, the deer - those are all he wants. 

He pauses when his hand falls on a Polaroid of a boot print, the familiar clover treads pushed into thick mud and preserved there, damning. It seems too sad to take with him, too far-removed from the person it signifies. But he never got John to sit for a picture, never pushed him. It’s all he has.

From the radio, Joss: “Generator’s off. I’m going. Good luck, everybody.” 

“Safe journey, Joss,” Harold says.

Fusco takes a step back, surveys the whole map, ringed in Polaroids of boot prints, of knife-gouges mimicking bear claw marks on the plastic lids of coolers, all of John’s sly little mistakes. He looks at the pins he stuck there, every one marking the site of a raid.

He noticed the pattern, of course. He noticed it a long time ago, before John first came to drink on his stairs. He noticed how the pins tended to cluster. If he’d been left on his own longer, Fusco thinks he would’ve gone to that area and walked around, hunting for the drifter who raids campsites, and things might’ve gone differently, maybe.

It’s not that big an area. It gets smaller if he’s expected.

From the radio, Sameen: “I’m out of here. Meet up at the bar in town after, assuming we don’t die?”

“We can make dinner plans later, Sameen. Be safe. Lionel, how are you doing?”

He white-knuckles the radio, holds it to his lips. “I’m on my way, Harold.” He stuffs the last pictures in his pack, zips up. He switches off the generator on his way out the door, lets the door clatter behind him.

“Good. All of you, just move steadily and be careful. I’ll check in periodically.”

Fusco steps outside and is immediately struck by how hot the wind is, how wrong it feels. It’s maybe four in the morning, according to his internal clock, but the sky is red with a false sunrise. He could be in very real danger, very soon.

He knows now that he was never going to leave John here. It was never an option, not even for a second.

Against Harold’s instructions, he immediately switches to his and John’s frequency. “Hey,” he begins as he clatters down the lookout stairs for what’ll probably be the last time. “I know you’ve been listening; I know you know what’s going on. I dunno if you have a plan for the shitstorm that’s on its way to your door right now, but I’m getting the fuck out of dodge and I’m not leaving ‘til I know you’re safe. If I had to guess, I’d say you’re somewhere off the lake trail. If I’m wrong, give me a shout. If I’m not...I’m coming to you. Meet me, if you can.”

No answer. It would make him feel so sure to hear John’s voice right now, to be given coordinates for a meeting place, to hear the words, “I’m coming with you.” But Fusco never expected to hear anything from John. He’s no optimist.

Still, the silence makes his heart pound.

Time passes but the sun doesn’t rise. The sky is choked, smoky gray and sandy brown from dust whipped up by the winds. The air is so dry, it crackles in his lungs. He stops briefly to put sunglasses on and tie a bandana over his nose and mouth to keep the dust out, shoulders his pack and starts walking again. He has time, he thinks. This is bad, but he has time.

He crests a ridge, sees the ragged tear of Thunder Canyon splitting the earth before him, sees ribbons of dust lashing across it, sees how the false sunset of fire all around him turns the rock blood red.

He has time.

He thinks John might be near the lake for the water, the fish. He might be in the caves. Fusco opts to go for both. He checks Harold’s frequency to make sure there’s no instructions being given, switches back to John. “I’m close by you,” he says. “Gonna sweep through the caves, go on to the lake. Not sure what I’ll do after that, but I’m not going home without you. That’s for goddamn sure.”

Still nothing. Again, he expected that.

_ You’re gonna feel real stupid, _ Fusco thinks to himself as he climbs down into the caves,  _ if it turns out John’s too busy heading for the rendezvous point to pay attention to your threats. _

He doesn’t believe that, really. More likely John’s stubborn enough and smart enough to keep quiet and lie low until Fusco’s sense of self-preservation kicks in. More likely he’s asleep.

More likely John’s dead than running scared.

His boots touch the cave floor. Right away, it’s quieter and cooler. A short-sighted man might see it as a safe place to sit out the wildfire. John’s not short-sighted, not impatient, and Fusco figures anyone hiding down here would soon discover it wasn’t so safe around the time smoke choked the air out of the cave or fire raging above turned the whole cave system into a brick oven or you found yourself waiting out the fire in a rocky hole with your food and water supplies dwindling. John wouldn’t stay in the caves. He hopes, anyway. All the same, Fusco calls for him once, stands perfectly still as his shout rattles around the cave.

No answer.

_ Because John wouldn’t hide in the caves,  _ he tells himself.

He takes the short path through the caves, on a fast-track towards the lake, and when he steps out from the mouth of the cave, he is struck by how much worse it is somehow. It’s like he’s at the bottom of Jonesy Lake, among the murk and the mud, only it’s hot and it’s dry and it’s bringing death with it. 

“What am I  _ doing _ ?” he says out loud. He’s a father, he has a kid waiting for him at home; he can’t stay out here in this. He has to get to Thoroughfare now. 

So he can leave John out here like this.

Fusco closes his fist tight, grits his teeth. If he hangs a right here, he can skip the lake, start blazing a trail straight for the rendezvous point. He hasn’t even wasted any time. The caves were technically a shortcut; he can make it to Thoroughfare in record time, finally see his coworkers in the flesh. He’s a hike and a helicopter away from beers in Jackson Hole with his friends and John...John doesn’t want to see him. John’s been on his own for a long, long time. John can take care of himself. 

Fusco hangs a left.

_ Stupid, _ he thinks as he runs up the path to the lake,  _ stupid, stupid, _ but he can’t leave John here on his own. He barely knows him, he’s half-afraid of him, but he can’t stand to leave John here with the fire bearing down on him. Because even though John’s smart, John won’t do the smart thing and go to civilization and wait this one out. Fusco sees two outcomes, both of them ugly. In the first, John lets this fire drive him deeper into the woods, so deep he might not ever see a person again, so deep he might stop being a person. In the second, he sees the fire coming and he waits for it, welcomes it, because somehow he thinks he deserves it.

So no, he won’t leave John alone. He doesn’t care if it’s stupid. 

Into the radio, he says, “I’m still here. I’m close. Get out here and talk to me, you coward.”

“Lionel!”

Fusco jumps. The shout didn’t come from the radio. It came from behind him.

He whips around and sure enough, there’s John, standing in the middle of the trail, muffled against the dust and smoke. Fusco runs to him.

“What are you doing?” John shouts, seizing him by the arm. “You have to get out of here!”

Fusco grabs him too, arms around John’s neck, gripping tight. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

He can’t see John’s eyes through what he’s guessing are ski goggles, but everything about his voice says fucking furious. He glances around, tight and nervous. “This is insane,” he murmurs. “Let me go. We’re walking.”

Fusco obeys hesitantly, is reassured when John holds tight to his arm as they walk back up the path.

“So stupid,” he hears John snarl.

Fusco doesn’t dignify that with a response, mostly ‘cause the wind is really loud. 

John guides him just off the trail to a rock wall he never really noticed before. It was just part of the scenery, too steep and craggy for him to climb. At the wall, John hands him a climbing rope that dangles off the side, half-disguised by the stubborn, scrubby brush that sprouts from between rocks.

“Get up,” John tells him. “It’s not as far as it looks.”

Fusco holds the rope tight, braces his boots on the rock wall, and starts climbing. He’s a little nervous about it, just ‘cause the rope looks old and he can’t see where the anchor is sunk. But he’s done this kind of thing a lot this summer and he’s used to it now, so there’s some confidence in the climb. It’s weird to think about how a few months ago, he wouldn’t have been able to do this.

At the top, he finds himself on a high, rocky plateau, overlooking the trees, shuddering and devastated by the winds, the glow of the flames ever more visible on the horizon. Are they getting closer, or is it just a better view? Hard to say. John reaches the top and Fusco takes his hand, hefts him up and over the edge. John staggers to his feet and pushes past him, over to something Fusco mistook in the moment for a fallen trail sign but he now realizes, as John lifts it off the ground, is a hatch. Beneath it is a dark hole in the earth that slopes down and out of sight. “Get in,” John says.

It doesn’t feel like the best idea, but he’s gone along with everything so far.

He steps down into the earth.

Like in the caves, it’s immediately cooler. The dirt floor is packed hard and worn smooth by boots and work; the ceiling is low. The walls, he sees, are reinforced with the beams of fallen trees. He expects to be plunged into darkness the further he walks, but there’s still light from somewhere ahead of him, still daylight.

Behind him, John lets the hatch door fall shut. “Why would you do this, Lionel?” he says, dangerously soft.

Fusco turns, finds John bent under the low ceilings. He has his bandanna and goggles pulled down to hang loose around his neck. His hair is tousled, full of blown dust. His face is thinner and paler than it was the last time Fusco saw him. 

“Call me crazy,” Fusco says, “but I kinda thought we got along. I don’t know what that means in the grand scheme of things, but basically, right now, it means I’m not OK leaving unless I know you’re gonna be safe.”

John exhales hard. “What were you going to do, Lionel? Waste hours hunting for me? You never would have found me. You’re lucky you came as close as you did.”

“First of all,” Fusco says, the back of his neck suddenly hot with anger, “luck had nothing to do with it. You saw my map with all your little mishaps on it back at the tower; I’ve known for weeks exactly where you operate. And second of all,” he continues, poking John hard in the chest, “of course I wasn’t gonna find the exact place. I just bet that if I told you I wasn’t gonna stop looking for you until I found you, you’d come out of hiding to stop me from wasting my goddamn time.” He’s breathing harder than he expects to be. He thinks his ears must be red. “My detective’s badge didn’t come from a box of Cracker Jack and I am not so stupid.”

John blinks at him. Not exactly surprised, Fusco doesn’t think, but very still. Very thoughtful. There’s a softness around his eyes that wasn’t there before. “Well,” he says finally. “You won your bet. Lionel, you need to get away from here.”

“Not without you,” Fusco says. “I’m set on that.”

John sighs, sounding very tired. “What happened to just wanting to know that I would be safe?”

“I thought about it. I don’t trust you to take care of yourself.”

John gestures to the space behind Fusco, further into the cavern. “I’ve managed so far.”

“That’s up for debate,” Fusco mutters at he turns.

If you really put the screws to him, he’d have to admit it was a nice setup, considering the circumstances. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears in these walls. Beams hauled from the outside and made to support the structure beneath the ground. A cozy-looking nest of blankets and sleeping bags. Laundry on a line. A camp stove on a low, rickety table, a kettle sitting precariously atop it. 

The whole place is filled with stuff he probably took from campsites: canned food, extra sleeping bags, batteries, brand new and unblunted hatchets, tanks of propane, a workbench covered in scattered electronics. Including, Fusco notices, a scanner. Before it is a notebook, crammed with notations in neat, block handwriting. Names. Dates and timestamps. Dialogue. Fusco reads the last few lines on the page:

_...the shitstorm that’s on its way to your door right now, but I’m getting the fuck out of dodge and I’m not leaving until I know you’re safe. If I had to guess, I’d say you’re somewhere off the lake trail. If I’m wrong, give me a shout. If I’m not, I’m coming to you. Meet me, if you can. _

Fusco taps the page with one finger, looks up to see John standing in the center of the room, watching him with a kind of sheepish eagerness. “You write down everything we say?” 

John flushes. “Only if it’s something I need to know.”

“Creep,” Fusco says to him. He’s smiling. He’s not sure he decided to smile at John, but he is all the same. 

“There’s nothing else to do.” John looks down at his shoes. “I ran out of books.”

Fusco reaches out, taps John once on the shoulder. Forgiveness, he guesses, or understanding. Or he just wants to touch him. He plucks a little at John’s jacket, then turns to face the view.

‘Cause John’s little hideout opens up at the end, a hole in the cliffside that overlooks a grand sweep of the forest, trees and rocks cascading down. It must be beautiful when it’s not like this, choked by smoke and dust. In the distance, he can see the shape of his tower, dark and bending in the wind. He can see Harold’s, even further on.

Harold. Fuck. He scrambles for his radio, tunes it back to Harold’s frequency to find that he’s just in time. 

“ - total shitshow,” Sameen’s saying, “but I’m making good time. Be there before 6 for sure.” 

“Hurry it up, babe,” Root says. “I’m  _ way  _ ahead.”

“Enough flirting,” Harold interrupts. “Lionel, please sound off.”

“I’m here,” Fusco chimes in, like he was never gone. “Slow going, but I’m doing fine so far. I’ll get there, well…” He turns to look at John who scowls at him helplessly. “When I get there, I guess.”

“Just be careful,” Harold says for what feels like the millionth time. “We’re not going to leave without you. Just keep moving.”

“You got it.” Fusco hooks the radio back on his belt.

“ _ Please _ ,” John says. “You need to go.”

“You know where I stand,” Fusco tells him. “That really is a beautiful view.”

“Lionel...”

“It’s weird to think of you up here watching us, all the time we were looking for you. Could you see me at all? Not on your own, I bet, but with binoculars, maybe?”

John sighs. “Not really,” he says finally. “Just lights. And the shape of you moving around sometimes.”

“Did you feel good? Powerful, I mean, like you had a secret. Or was it just lonely to watch?”

His breathing shudders. “You  _ know _ . Don’t make me say it.”

“I bet it’s a really beautiful place to live,” Fusco says, “most of the time.”

He feels John move in close behind him, feels the heat of him just bare inches from his back. “I worked so hard on it.” His voice is thin, bereft. “At first it was just something to do, while I was out here. But I dug it out and I cut down the trees for these beams. I dragged them down here, worked until my fingers bled to make this place safe. It was...for me. I never had that.”

“Can I ask you something, John?”

His voice cracks a little when he says, “Yeah.”

“If it’s for you, why didn’t you make the ceilings higher?”

The ragged breath that escapes him is so soft, so choked, Fusco almost doesn’t recognize it as a laugh. It’s easier when John settles behind him, puts his arms around Fusco, buries his face in the top of Fusco’s head. “I missed you,” he says.

Fusco leans back into him, holds his wrists tight. “Missed you too, pal.”

“I don’t have the supplies,” John says. “It’s going to be tight for me alone. The two of us can’t make it through the winter together.”

“‘S OK,” Fusco says. “That was never the plan.”

“I would like that,” he sighs very softly into Fusco’s hair. “I know I can’t have it but I want you to stay out here with me.”

In a fairytale way, he’d like it too, to spend an endless summer out here with John. They’d climb mountains and fish in rivers, sun themselves on rocks and keep each other warm through chilly nights and they’d be free of whatever’s waiting for them out in the real world. They’d be happy.

But that’s a fantasy that cuts out the hard parts: the flooding, the fires, the cold, the starvation. John knows better than he does how it would be hell. Fusco knows better than John does how much he’d grow to resent John for keeping him there, how badly he’d grow to miss his son. 

He thinks John’s longing is what makes it seem sweet, more than anything.

“It’s all gonna burn up,” Fusco says softly. “Isn’t it, John?”

John’s grip relaxes. “It is.” He steps back from Fusco.

Fusco turns, looks up into his tired eyes. “Where are you gonna go from here?”

“There are places,” he insists. “Deep in the woods. It’ll be hard for a while. But everything grows back, after a fire. Maybe not for a long time, but one day.”

Fusco remembers the way John’s ribs felt under his hands that first night in the cabin and the idea of him weathering a harder winter, scraping out a thinner, harder existence, makes him want to cry. “John, I’m asking you not to do this to yourself.”

“You can’t ask me that,” John snarls. “I can take care of myself out here. There’s no place for me in New York.”

“Buddy, if there’s no place for you in my life right now, I’ll  _ make  _ one.”

John’s voice breaks, desperate: “You barely know me.”

“You barely know me either. I know you think you know all this stuff because you’re so world-weary and you listen to all our conversations or whatever the fuck, but you don’t know shit about me. All I know is that I like you, John. And I think you like me too. And neither of us likes anybody anymore, so that fucking  _ matters _ .”

John shudders. His face falls.

“Just walk me there?” Fusco’s voice comes out thin and ragged. He doesn’t want to sound like he’s pleading, but he is, so maybe it’s just honesty. “I can’t make you do anything. I know that. Maybe you really can’t make yourself come back. Maybe it hurts too much. I get it. I don’t understand it, but I...I  _ get  _ it, you know? So if you can’t go with me, at least walk with me, one last time.”

John exhales. “Let me pack.”

It’s disjointed, what John brings. Fusco sits on John’s bed and watches what he takes with interest. A little food. Some water bottles. An extra pair of ski goggles that he tosses Lionel’s way - “To keep the dust out of your eyes,” he says. Clothes, some of them pretty spotless, like he was saving them for something. A few little things that he carved in wood.

“You need batteries?” Fusco asks. “For your new life?”

“No,” John says, shortly, as he crams notebooks into his bag.

“What about a sleeping bag?” he asks, holding up the corner of the one he’s sitting on.

“Stop talking, Lionel.”

Fusco lets his eyes drift to the Polaroids pinned to a beam next to the bed. He’s been a little afraid to look, mostly ‘cause he knows they’re of him.

Sure enough, it’s that day they climbed Beartooth Point together, captured in that blurry way that Polaroid pictures have, where things almost seem to glow. They’re not all of him; there’s one of the landscape spread out before them as they climbed down, green trees and lakes that mirror the sky. There’s one of a cluster of mushrooms growing amongst the twisted roots of a tree, fleshy and red-orange. There’s one of a turtle from charmingly close-up, like the photographer got on the ground to see eye-to-eye with the little thing. 

And yeah, there’s a few of Fusco. Him standing in a sundrenched clearing, face upturned to catch the light. Him inching his way down a bare rock face, the muscles in his legs bunching and standing out in a way he doesn’t expect them to. Him lying at the top of Beartooth Point, arms folded behind his head, his eyes closed. 

Reese asked to keep the pictures, Fusco remembers. He didn’t think about this, the photos pinned to the wall, providing meager spots of color.

He looks up to find John staring down at him. Tall and lanky and sharp-featured as he is, he seems oddly fragile in that moment. 

“You kept ‘em?” Fusco asks.

John nods, a little meekly.

Fusco lays a hand on his shin, reassuring. “You’re a sentimental guy, John.”

John gives him a brief, thin smile. “Could you get those for me?”

“Yeah,” Fusco says. “Yeah, no problem.”

He collects all the photos into a thin, neat stack and tucks them into his pack alongside his own, and when he looks up again, he finds John reaching out to him, ready to pull him to his feet. “Time to get out of here.”

Fusco takes John’s hand and finds that it’s trembling. He grips at it hard until it’s steady again.

They close up John’s hideout carefully, diligently, as though it won’t burn at all, as though it’s a vacation house and they’ll be back next summer. “It’s a good place,” John says as he weighs down the hatch with rocks. “I know it’s not at its best right now, but…”

Fusco hands him another rock. “I believe you.”

They start walking. Fusco catches John looking back a couple of times, trying to catch a last glimpse of his home before the dust swallows it up. Fusco can’t blame him for that. He’d been a wreck at the airport on the way here and this is worse. At least his apartment wasn’t about to go up in flames.

Although: not the worst thing, if it did.

John settles after a while and they walk together, shoulder to shoulder, bent into the wind.

When Harold announces that Root made it to Thoroughfare - “See you in a couple hours, sweetie,” she says in reply to Sameen’s cry of anguish - he makes them all sound off again. Sameen’s more like 30 minutes away; Joss is about an hour off, but she has further to hike. Fusco admits he’s about two hours off.

“Are you gonna be OK?” Joss asks. 

“I’m good,” Fusco insists. “I’m moving. I just…” He makes what he guesses is eye contact with John, although it’s hard to tell through the ski goggles. “...I just lost time.” Fusco lets go of the radio button. “Should I tell them you’re coming with me?”

John doesn’t nod, doesn’t shake his head, doesn’t even shrug, so Fusco decides to keep that to himself for now.

“Lionel, I know I’ve been emphasizing care, but…”

“I get it, I get it. I’ll pick up the pace.” 

Which he’s doing, by the way. Although he’d almost have to, given he stopped dead for 30 minutes to beg John to leave with him. Anything would be faster than that. But there is a single-mindedness to the way he’s moving now, a steady pull forward. There’s nothing here for him anymore except the guy next to him, so all he has to do is keep walking.

Not so for John. But then, John’s legs are longer, so between the two, they kind of keep pace.

They walk due north. As they move, the smoke in the sky gets thicker.

Sometimes, they hear helicopters.

Around the time Sameen announces she made it to the tower, Fusco starts to spot little bright spots in the air, like fireflies. Cinders, blown off the blaze and burning out before they can land in the dry grass. It’s closing in. He can hear propellers pulsing in the radio.

“That our ride out of here?” Fusco asks.

“Yes.” Harold sounds tense. “Root and Sameen are ready to go. Joss, will you…?”

“I’m still a little ways out,” she says, panting a little. “It’ll be at least 15 minutes, probably more. I’ll do whatever makes the most sense.”

Fusco, still with miles ahead of him, feels a lump form in his throat.

“Right. I’m sending Sameen and Root on ahead. We’ll all catch the next one together. Lionel?”

“Still got far to go,” he admits. “I’m keeping pace, but...sorry.”

“Do  _ not  _ be sorry,” Harold says. “I will wait here for you as long as I can and the helicopters will keep coming as long as you’re out there. Just keep walking.”

“Got it,” he says.

Joss breaks protocol, says, “See you soon, Lionel.”

He grins into the radio, a little happy, a little hopeless. “See you.”

John grabs him tight by the wrist. “I’m not letting you get left behind,” he says.

Fusco tilts into him, brushes against his shoulder. “Thanks.”

“We need to speed up.”

“I know.”

He lets John pull him off-trail, through tall grasses and among the trees and boulders. Fusco keeps thinking about how he’d screw it up, he’d get them into some impassible ravine and eat up all their time with backtracking, but John seems to know every step, every trick, every twist in the path and how they can be connected. John understands the forest like Fusco understood his old beat, every crack in the sidewalk, every guy you didn’t want to cross, every language in every mouth. Fusco wonders how it will change with the fire, whether John would still know it with the same unerring intimacy.

He feels a weird pang of regret that he’s trying so hard to take John away from this place. Will he ever know anything so beautiful so well?

They’re rappelling up a rope that he’s pretty sure John installed in this cliff-face, not the park service, when Harold announces Joss’s arrival at the tower with a pained kind of delicacy. “How close…?” Harold begins to ask him.

Fusco wrenches himself over the top of the cliff, pulls the radio from his belt. “I’m getting there,” he gasps into it. He takes too deep a breath, lapses into a coughing fit as he chokes on smoke.

“Are you alright, Lionel?”

“Yeah,” he wheezes as John pounds hard at his back. “Yeah, it’s just...you know, the smoke.”

“How much further, Lionel?”

He makes eye contact with John, who nods encouragingly. “Close!” he says. “I’m close.”

In the background, he hears the increasingly loud whir of the propellers. “Next helicopter?” he asks.

“We can wait,” Harold assures him.

John lifts him by his pack and they start walking again. From here, they can see it, the way the fire moves, the way it creeps over the hills and valleys, spreading from tree to tree and ripping through tall grass faster than they could ever walk. It’s all burning down.

If John notices, he can’t bear to look. He’s got his eyes on the path ahead. Before them is a ravine and a wooden cable car, shuddering in the wind.

“Jesus,” Fusco says, skidding to a stop. “We’re getting in that thing?”

John grips him by both shoulders, pushes him along. “It’s the only way across to Thoroughfare.” It’s true, Fusco realizes as he recognizes the shape of Thoroughfare in the distance, nearly obscured by smoke. John steps up to the cable car platform, pulls the door open.

It’s small. It’s really small. And it swings when the wind blows too hard. 

Fusco’s suddenly rooted to the ground. “No.”

“You have to.”

“It’s a fucking nightmare. That thing’s the size of a phone booth. No way can we both get in there.”

John pauses guiltily. “You’re right. It’s one at a time.”

Fusco blinks at him. “You’re kidding me.”

Harold comes through the radio again: “Lionel, where are you?”

He maintains unblinking, angry eye contact with Reese as he lifts the radio. “At the cable car.”

A sigh of relief. “Thank God, you’re nearly here. The pilot wants to leave…”

“How much room on the helicopter?” Fusco asks.

“What? Enough. You’ll be fine. Please…”

He presses: “For how many people?”

“Certainly three,” Harold says. “It’ll be tight of course - we do have Bear - but…”

“You two better go on ahead then,” Fusco tells them. “I’ll get the next one.”

“Lionel? I…”

“I’m not alone.”

He’s not sure what he expects Reese to do. Hit him, maybe, or walk off into the burning woods never to be seen again. Not this. Not stand by him, quiet and still, hand on his arm.

He’s not sure what he expects from Harold either. Questions, for sure. Maybe for him to assume insanity on his part and try to coax him into bringing his imaginary friend across the ravine. Not this. Not just, “ _ Oh _ ,” very softly.

“Very well,” Harold says after a few bare, icy moments. “We’ll go on ahead.”

Fusco can hear Joss protesting in the background.

“I’m...I’m relieved to know that you both made it out safe,” Harold adds. “In particular, if you could let him know that...that I’ve thought of him often. And that I’ve often felt I didn’t do enough for him.”

Fusco mouths to John,  _ What? _

John looks equally taken aback.

“Don’t be surprised,” Harold says. “It’s not as though you speak over a secure line. And it’s not as though there wasn’t reason to suspect John was still at large in the Shoshone.” Louder sounds of protest from Joss in the background. “We can discuss it on the ground,” Harold says, apparently addressing everyone. “Be well. I’ll see you soon.”

John plucks at Fusco’s sleeve. “Tell him thank you?” John asks. “For looking after my dog.”

Fusco lifts the radio to his mouth. “OK,” he says. “John says thanks for watching Bear.”

“Oh,” Harold says softly, nearly drowned out as the sound of the propeller grows louder and louder, “oh, of course.”

And that’s the last they hear from him for a while.

Fusco puts the radio away, pushes up his ski goggles. John does the same. They’re just standing there by the cable car, squinting through the smoke. “Is this a two-person job?” Fusco asks, gesturing at the cable car.

“No,” John says. “You can work it on your own.”

“OK then,” he says. “I’m gonna go ahead. You come after me.”

“Lionel…”

“I trust you,” he interrupts. “I kinda have to. Or what’s the point?” 

John nods to him, bereft and tired.

“So I’m gonna go,” Fusco says, putting one foot in the cable car, “and I’ll see you on the other side.”

It’s hard to work the cable car. It’s rusty, ancient, and it inches along the cable. All the same, John fades from view fast, obscured by blown smoke. 

He just has to trust that he’s still there.

Against everything, trust.

When he reaches the end, he sends the car back, creaking. He trusts it to find its way back to John. He turns.

And there’s Thoroughfare. It’s not as tall as his tower, not as many steps, but then it is on top of a huge goddamn mountain. He guesses it doesn’t need to be tall. As he climbs the steps, he thinks it might be bigger than Two Forks, though. It’s been painstakingly painted white.

Inside, Thoroughfare looks like a place where Harold would live. It’s aggressively neat and pristine, the bed made, the desk organized, the kitchen scrubbed. Even in the spots where it’s a little worn down and broken in, it’s still in a clean, genteel kind of way. It’s there in Bear’s dog bed with its worn-in center, the stacks of much-loved books, the typewriter with keys that don’t have letters anymore, just the smooth divot of fingertips. He can imagine Harold whiling away the hours up here. 

And there’s Harold’s telescope in the corner, inclined down, towards the scenery below. Fusco uses it to seek out his own tower. The flames are almost on it now. It’ll be gone soon, he bets.

Behind him, the door bangs shut. 

Fusco turns to find John in the doorway, knocking the dust out of his boots. He finds that his mouth is dry, that his knees are suddenly weak. “You made it,” he says.

John flashes him a grin, weak but proud. “I did.”

They stand there, in their opposite corners, smiling like idiots.

Fusco takes a shy, shaky step forward. “I was worried you weren’t gonna come.”

“I...wasn’t,” John admits, raking a hand through his sooty hair. “I was going to let you go across and then turn around. Go back. That was my plan.”

He thinks he might have seen that in John’s eyes, as the cable car pulled away. He takes another step forward. “Why didn’t you?”

John just stands very still, takes a slow breath that makes his whole body shake. Fusco closes the distance between them, puts his arms around him and squeezes him gentle. Cautiously, delicately, John folds his arms around Fusco, settles into him.

“You’re not gonna fix me,” John murmurs against Fusco’s forehead.

Fusco nuzzles into him. “Yeah, pal, I know.”

“What happens in New York?” John asks.

Fusco holds him tighter. “I’ve been wondering that myself. And I guess I don’t know what’s gonna happen in New York, exactly. But I figure,” he says, as they begin to sway together, “if you watch my back and I watch your back...we’ll probably come out OK. That’s a start. OK?”

He feels John nodding.

They stay like that, holding each other in Thoroughfare tower, until they hear the helicopter touch down outside.

They go out to meet it together.


End file.
